Small Town Murder - Serial Granny - Burlington, North Carolina

Episode Date: June 11, 2026

This week, in Burlington, North Carolina, a woman grows up in a life, filled with tragedy, and horrors. As an adult, every person she knows seems to die in unfortunate ways, and ahead of their time. The list includes her father, her mother in law, multiple husbands, a nice lady from work, and the guy who cuts meat at the grocery store, to name a few. But when her 3rd husband is has a mystery illness, that only seems to get worse, detectives do some digging, and come up with evidence of a serial killer at work!!   Along the way, we find out that carousels are more complicated & crazy than they seem, that there is only so much calamity that can happen around you, before people start thinking it might be your fault, and you have to have serious guts, or be seriously crazy, to try to murder someone, right out in the open!!   New episodes, every Wednesday & Friday nights!! Check us out on VIDEO Wednesday and Friday evenings on Netflix! www.netflix.com/smalltownmurder Go to shutupandgivememurder.com for all things Small Town Murder, Crime In Sports & Your Stupid Opinions!   Follow us on... instagram.com/smalltownmurder facebook.com/smalltownpod   Also, check out James & Jimmie's other shows, Crime In Sports & Your Stupid Opinions on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts!!

This week, in Burlington, North Carolina, a series of deaths over a long period of time seems like unavoidable tragedies, until a man survives a horrible illness, leading detectives to look at the most unlikely murder suspect possible, a grandmotherly church lady with a history of calamity and misfortune. Welcome to Smalltown Murder. Hello, everybody, and welcome back to Small Town Murder. Yay! Yay, indeed, Jimmy. Yay, indeed.

My name is James Petro Gallo. I'm here with my co-host. I'm Jimmy Wiseman. Thank you, folks, so much for joining us today on another crazy. This is a crazy-ass episode. Let me tell you. If the intro didn't give away that it's a crazy episode, it is crazy, and there's a lot of death here. Wild stuff here.

So thank you so much for joining us. You will not be disappointed. Before we get started, head over to shut up and give me murder.com. Get it all there. First of all, all of your merchandise, everything like that, everything from skateboards. to shower curtains. It's all right there. Then also get your tickets for live shows,

live shows starting up again after the summer. September 18th in Milwaukee at the Pabst. That's going to be great. Not a lot of tickets left for that, too. So get those right now. Then September 19th in Minneapolis at the state theater, get those tickets right now. Do not, don't let Milwaukee punk you Minneapolis.

It's one of the best venues in the country. It's great. Yeah, we love going to Minnesota, too. We love the crowd, and we like to, especially the weather in September, be nice, it's going to be good. Then we'll be in Dallas on October 3rd, October 16th, 17th, San Jose, Sacramento. Get those tickets. And then November 13th and 14th, Terrytown in Boston. And Terrytown is getting close. So I would get those tickets soon if you want to go to that, even though it's in December.

So that said, definitely shut up and give me murder.com. Listen to our other two shows, of course, crime in sports, where we're doing a large series on the Yahweh cult from the 80s in Miami there, Yahweh Ben-Yahu and all the murders because one of the guys who killed a lot of people happened to be an NFL player. So we're doing all of that. Then your stupid opinions is just hilarious. Get in there and listen to that. Get yourself Patreon as well, everybody.

Patreon.com slash crime in sports is where you get all of the bonus material. All you have to be is $5 a month or above and you get every damn tiny whatever we put out, including as soon as you subscribe hundreds of back bonus episodes. you've never heard before, almost 400, to be exact. And then new ones every other week, one crime in sports, one small town murder, and you get them all, everybody. You get it all. You get it all. This week, what we're going to talk about.

For crime in sports, it's the craziest hostage situations that have happened. These are crazy. The Stockholm syndrome one gave me this idea to look up others, and there's a lot of wild hostage situations, and they resolve in wild ways. And then for small town murder, it looks like right now, as the poll stands, it's probably going to be the crash. and all the McKenzie Shirilla stuff, but still time to get your vote in for Corey Richens, if that's what you want. So there is that,

and then the week after it'll be Corey Richen, so it doesn't matter. So there you go, everybody. There is Patreon. Patreon.com slash crime in sports is where you get all of that. And you get every show we put out. Crime and Sports, your stupid opinion, small town murder,

all ad free with that Patreon as well. And you get a shout out at the end of the show, too. Jimmy will go ahead and mispronounce your name for you. Yeah. Even though he would love to get it correct. Trust me on that. So that said, disclaimer time.

This is a comedy show, everybody. We are comedians. We're going to make jokes, but that does not mean that everything that happens isn't true and real and all of that. That's, we try to get it as accurate as humanly possible here. We like to have, we like to say we try to do better research than Dateline, but also be funny. That's what we're trying to do here. So you might go, that's a tight walk. That's a tight rope walk there.

do that? Well, very easily, I think, actually. There's plenty to make fun of, first of all. Sure. You don't have to make fun of the victim, and we don't. We never make fun of the victims or the victim's families. Why is that, James? Because we're assholes, but we're not scumbags. See? And that works. It's very easy. That's how that goes there. There's plenty to make fun of. We make fun of a small town because we're all from somewhere that deserves to be made fun of. Maybe a police force lets a murderer kill more and more. We should make fun of those guys for being terrible at their job. And then we make fun of murderers because fuck them. What are we going to do?

Yeah, we get no other recourse on murderers. So that's what we do there. So that's how it works. If you think that that sounds great, you got a great story ahead of you. If you think true crime and comedy should never, ever go together, I don't know why you're here, first of all. But second of all, no complaint and later. I don't know what to tell you. Check it out.

Yeah, check it out. I think you'll like it. And if not, then don't complain about it. Just go about your day. There you go. So that sounds good to me. I hope it sounds good to you and everybody out there. That said, I think it's time to sit back, everybody.

What do you say here? Clear the lungs. And let's all shout. Shut up and give me murder. Let's do this, everybody. Okay. Let's go on a trip, shall we? Let us go.

We are going to North Carolina this week. What? Back to North Carolina. That's right. We're going to Burlington, North Carolina here. Who knew? In honor of North Carolina, here, I grab some cheer wine for the thing because that's where I got hooked on the stuff. It's good.

What is, uh, huh, Burlington? There's another one up in, what, Vermont? Oh, yeah, there's plenty of Burlington's. Yeah. And there's also a coat factory, I believe. Sure, sure, yeah. Well, I don't think they call it fact, co factory anymore. They can call it whatever they want.

It's still, yeah, it's still a place where you get somebody else's underwear packed in your brand new box. I don't care what they call it. It's always a coat factory. You can't ever outlive that. You can't outrun the name coat factory. They put a heart in a logo. They care about that. Nobody loves this.

No. And they don't love you for sure. If they did, they would at least make sure the underwear didn't have somebody else's in it. So that said here, North Central, North Carolina. It's about an hour to Raleigh.

If you go kind of southeast, it's about an hour 45 to Charlotte, if you go the other direction. It's about 50 minutes to Walburg, North Carolina. Our last North Carolina episode, Episode 665, deadly deeds with dad. I remember that.

That was a wild one. This is in two different counties. It is Alamance County and Gullford County. Area Code 336 and 743. Hell yeah. And the motto here. Okay. They have a motto.

Belong in Burlington. You must. You come here. You belong because you're here. Yeah. Or they're telling you. Yeah. You belong here.

You buy yesterday's seasons. Codes. You belong here. We don't have any schools or anything. So sex offenders is the only place you can live. Maybe that's what they're saying. We all belong. We all belong.

History of this town here. Okay. Obviously, there's natives here first, but the early settlers here were groups of Quakers. Quakers, which are still around some of the Quakers in this area. Is it close to the coast? No, no. Middle of the state. North Central.

How about that? Up in the middle there. Yeah, the Quakers can't shake. those Quakers once they get their hooks in. They're like ticks. They're not coming out. And also there was German farmers and Scottish immigrants and Irish immigrants and that kind of thing here. Now, the North Carolina Railroad in the 1850s needed to find some land where they could build, repair, and do maintenance on its track.

That's how this town started. So they would take the trains to deliver the new track? Is that what it is? Is that how you do that? I have no idea. Yeah, that's fascinating. I'm so interested in that now. I have no idea.

I'm going to read a book. No, you're not. The fuck are you kidding? You won't read a book for this. No. I'm going to read a book for that. So not long after this, the railroad realized they needed repair shops. Now, that's what I was getting into here, was this place was for repair shops.

They figured out another place to build the stuff, but then they needed a place to repair the stuff. Yeah. And that was here, basically. So that's how it worked. Now, the official name of the town at first was company shops. Company shops, North Carolina, which has a ring to it. That's where everybody wants to retire. It's my dream.

Yeah. Yeah, you know, you just sit on the beach and company shops. Then they changed it to Vance for a couple of years during the Civil War. Then they returned it to company shops in July of 1864, still during the Civil War. So that's crazy. The company shops remained a small village without anything like churches or schools or anything like that. It was just where a place where a bunch of dirty guys lived covered in grease so they could fix. Fixing and train trucks.

Locomotive engines. Now, following the leasing of the railroad to Richmond and Danville, a bunch of the railroad jobs transferred to other places. So the shops no longer operated there. And that's when they said we shouldn't be called company shops anymore. That's a little weird considering there are any. No, not a company, nor a shop. a shop. So in 1880s, they didn't even have any shops. They're, I'm sure. So in February 1887, a contest was held, which always gets the best. That's how expansion, like,

football teams get their names. You shouldn't name a whole town after that. It was held to decide a name, and one person submitted the name Burlington only because they saw it, they saw it on the side of a passing train, and they thought they liked the way it sounded. There's nobody named Burlington. Nobody started the town named Burlington. It has nothing to do with this place. Those trains still exist. There was just, I've seen them. People's old underwear and shitty, you know. Yeah.

And $86. Cots. $86. Park is that are normally $199. That's what they saw going by. From three years ago. From three years ago. Well, yeah, obviously.

There was, I was in a Burlington like five years ago and they had tons of members-only jackets. Really? Tons of them. Yeah, they did have a resurgence there for a minute. They had like, I felt like I was a member. They had all. I must have been a member being in this place because there was all of them. They had leather ones.

I was like, who the fuck? I saw a white leather members-only jacket. Not white. What kind of a... This is like Jesse Gemstone wouldn't even wear that. This is insane. Who the fuck would wear this? Not white.

White, Jamie. Don't get a white one. White leather members-only jacket. It's exactly the members-only jacket. But white. It was white. Yeah. I'd like to wear this for two days.

Yeah. I just got a white puffy one? I'll never wear it. No. Two days. That thing is filthy and gross. Yeah. Like a hobo.

I'm going to order a coffee and I'll never wear this again. You might as well get a bindle two days from now. It should come with a bindle because you're going to look like your travel in the tracks there. I'm going to look so homeless. So anyway, they changed it to Burlington based on that because that's a good reason to name a town. So anyway, reviews of this town, I've never been here. I don't know anything about it. So let's find out.

Five stars. I have lived in Burlington all of my life and have no. major concerns. Okay. Overall, it's pretty well. Okay. Overall, it's pretty well. They heard that you enjoy it.

Yeah. Proper English. I don't think that's, it might be, but I think they heard that, like, instead of good, you're supposed to use well

when someone asks you how you're doing, so they were like, overall, it's pretty well. When, like, that's a perfect opportunity for good also.

Good would work here just as well, is what I'm saying? Yeah, both work. It's pretty well. Doesn't sound great. It doesn't flow as well, is all I'm saying.

It doesn't have the flow to it. Probably the right usage, though. Not saying it's not. Yeah, it just doesn't flow very well. Sounds funny. Events for children and family oriented. Okay. Three stars.

It's a decent town, but if you're young and looking for things to do, dot, dot, dot, good luck. You run out of things pretty quickly. I'll believe that. Things to do, meaning drugs, I would assume, because you're going to get bored. fast here. Two stars finally here. There are home, the homes are fairly old and need work and improvement. Okay. I'm unsure of the interior of other homes. Oh, are you? The outside. The inside might be great. Nobody invites me over. But my home is furnished with our belongings from previous homes. You know, how people like, like normal. I don't know. I had to, when I first found this

review, I had to read that like three times. And I'm like, so you just, you mean, you mean? you bring your shit when you move from place to place. This guy thinks you go and buy new shit every time. You just leave it all behind. Yeah, so most of our furniture could not fit into this smaller home. So we either got rid of it or store them in storage. This is a review of the town. Thank you for telling me how you move.

I don't understand. Does you rent a truck? Are you going to tell us that? This is why people are the worst. Hey, how do you like Burlington? And literally two sentences into it. You're like, we couldn't fit all this stuff in a smaller home, so we put it in storage and I'm going to look, what the fuck are we talking about? I asked you how the town was. There are some buildings down the road which are abandoned, not sure of what they were before. The utilities and bills are old, so sometimes it can run high for this being a small home. What? Wow. I'm fascinated by that person. That's one of those, you read it and you go, I wish English wasn't their first language, because then I could give them a excuse, but I really feel like it is, and they're just morons. Yeah. People in this town, 56,000, 563.

Dang. There was less when the murder occurred as well. But 56563, it's almost 52% women, 51.6% women. So it's a lot of women in this town. Median age is right at the national average, 38.8, pretty close to it. Family in this town here, it's 44% married, but 24% single with children, which is more than double what we usually. That's pretty high. The average, yeah. So it's not exactly like a little suburb type of joint. You know what I mean? But it's also a bunch of fun people.

So they seem to be having a good time. Yeah, they're, I mean, they're fucking. I mean, know that. That's good. That's always fun. Yeah. No one complains about that. It's the person that they made it with.

I mean, that's fine. That's up to you. Whatever you want. Race in this town, 47.4. percent white, 29.2% black, 3.3% Asian, 17.6% Hispanic. It's like America. Yeah, it's a very, yeah, it's a, well, a lot of southern towns are like that, too. There'll be kind of half white, half black. Really spread out. Yeah. It's kind of nice. Yeah. So then we also have 43.2% of the people here are religious, and it's honestly spread out

pretty good here. But the most, of course, is Baptist. As we know. Baptists are the Catholics of the South, obviously. They're everywhere down there. Zero point zero percent Jewish. It is rural North Carolina. Unemployment here still is slightly low, slightly under the national average, but so is the median household income. It's very low. Normally it's about 69,000. That's the average. Here, the median household income 47, 158. Oh, boy. That's low. That's not great. Cost of living here, 100 is. regular average. Here it is 84. So not too, too low. The housing is the low thing. It's not low enough, though. No, that's what I mean. The housing median home costs here, $195,600. So that's pretty high, but still affordable. To be under $200,000 in the country right now, unless you're in West Virginia, that's a pretty good price. So, I mean, maybe you need this place. Maybe you want run for mayor and have them return to their roots

as company shops, North Carolina. Well, you're going to need someplace to live first. So we have for you. The Burlington, North Carolina, real estate report. Your average two-bedroom rental here goes for $1,050, which is a couple hundred below the national average.

Yeah, below the national average. Here is House number one, and I use the word house loosely. It is a trailer. Single-wide, it appears to be. Three-bedroom two-bath, it doesn't tell you the square footage. I'm going to say about 800. Yeah, exactly.

It's a single-wide trailer, about 800. It's 10 by 80 or 10-by-90. There's carpet in the living room, which I don't care for and shit like that. It's not great. Put it that way. It's a trailer. Built, quote-unquote, in 2007, assembled in 2007. $55,000 for that, though.

I bet that doesn't come with the land. I think that's pretty good. I think so. If it comes with the land, it's fine. It doesn't. Yeah, if you've got to pay a lot fee, then you're shit out of luck here. Next up, four bedroom, two bath, 1168 square foot house. It's a cool little old house.

It has like brick and concrete steps that go up and then it's siding. But it's built in 1910, and it's nice. Got some nice wood floors in there. It's a cool little house. It's not bad. Not a very, 1,200 square feet, four bedrooms. You're cramming them into that. It's a small house.

$205,000 for that, though. Holy. So, I mean, you could live in it. It's got four bedrooms. You've got a couple of kids. Then if you want to spread out a bit, let's say. You're a tall drink of water. Got to spread your shit out here.

You got four bedrooms, six bath, tea bowl for each and every beehole that you might have out there in the world. 5,237 square feet. God, damn. Big. It's a big, like, stone and brick house. It's gorgeous. It's on 10 acres.

Plenty of room to spread out, just woods behind you as far as it goes. It's a gorgeous place. It's well done inside, too, clearly kept up to date. $1,620,000 for that, though. 1.6. One point just had an $80,000 price cut. It was 1.7. Give it a bit here.

Things to do, well, they also have the Burlington Carousel Festival. Okay. It's the largest event in Burlington, the Carousel Festival. Yeah, there's nothing. I hate more than a carousel. It's stupid. It celebrates the historic hand-carved 1910s Densel Carousel. I don't know.

That's like back in, that's the heyday of carousels. It's like, 1910. 1910. People really didn't have radio yet. They didn't have anything to do. So sitting on a fucking wooden horse and going around slowly was like, that was an activity back in 1910. Did it go up and down back then, you think?

Or do you think that was like 1930? No, I'm sure they had kids who were like had a day off from being newsies or pinboys. I assume would be up there doing this, raising the kids. Covered in grease, you know what I mean? Looking like Dick Van Dyke and Mary Poppins. You ever look up on a carousel? That is the most horrifying thing ever. There's just gobs and grease that's keeping this thing going.

All sorts of mechanisms that can break. Throw your child off. So the Carousel Festivals features live music on multiple stages. Yeah. And all sorts of other shit here. They have, let's see, who's performing there. Buddy Jewel will be there. Yeah, he's great.

You know, are you kidding? No. Is that a good... I don't know if you're kidding. I don't know. I meant that. A country singer, he's gone. Oh, okay.

I figured he was a country singer. That went without saying. That's a huge rapper. Anybody's ever heard of him before. What's nowadays might be. Did they leave off the Z? He's a rapper. Yeah, auto tune country fucking horse shit rap.

That is the worst shit. Buddy Jules a pretty decent singer. He's probably a douche. I don't know. I have no idea. But yeah, there he is. He's going to be performing there from 10 a.m. Oh, no, the concerts from 6 p.m. to 7.

Oh. He's opening for the fireworks is what he's doing. Okay. That's a rough one. He is the headliner, but the fireworks are the real headliner. That's the real headliner. Crime rate in this town, what we are interested in here, property crime, about 25% above the national average.

Wow. Some shit going down. And then violent crime, murder rape robbery, and, of course, assault, The Mount Rushmore of crime, obviously, is also about the same amount. It's about 25% above the average. So this place is a little frightening. This place is fucking, yeah, no, no, no, it's, you know, deadwood over here, it sounds like. It's not good.

Watch out. It's tombstone. So, that said, let's talk about some murder. What do you say, everybody? Let's do this. All right, we have some wild shit here. Let's start out by talking about a lady, okay? She has problems.

A lot of problems growing up And really throughout her life Her name is Blanche Kaiser That's how she's born K-A-I or K-I-S-E-R Kaiser Oh So Blanche here Then she'll be Blanche Kaiser Taylor

And Blanche Kaiser Taylor-More also She's got some stuff Yeah Kaiser Taylor Moore It sounds like a law firm It's almost a television show Kaiser Taylor Moore Yeah it really is

February 17th 1933 she's born All right. Now, yeah, and she has just problems. I like to call her this whole time I've been putting this episode together. I've been calling her Calamity Blanche. That's what I keep calling her. Old Calamity Blanche over here, speaking of Deadwood. Tough life.

She's born in Concord, North Carolina. She is the fifth of seven children. Good Lord. You couldn't be, like, if you were telling a joke and you were like trying to say someone was like anonymous, you would say they're like the fifth of seven children. Like that would be, you know what I mean? There's like no. That poor sixth one. Yeah.

Well, even the sixth that's getting there at least. Like four and five are really nobody. Like nobody knows what the hell they're doing out of seven kids. Now, her father was Parker Davis Kaiser. Everyone called him PD. And his mother's name was Flani. Flani Blanch Kaiser. Her mother or his mother?

Her mother is Flani Blanche Kaiser. So she's named after her mother's middle name. Now, PD, Dad, is, is, I don't even know if a character covers him because he's a, not that great of a guy here. He worked in the mills. And at the same time, was an ordained Baptist minister as well. So he would talk, he's a, and this is like fire and brimstone, sin and redemption shit he's talking about. This isn't love your neighbor or anything. This is fiery Baptist shit of you're going to burn.

Turn on the other cheek. Hellfires is what they're talking about from sin and all. that stuff. That's what he, anyway, that's what he was really into talking about. The problem is when he's not,

because after a while, he just becomes a preacher, and only a preacher, but basically if he's not standing in the pulpit, like if he takes one step to the side, he's going to be drinking, gambling, or fucking a strange woman,

one of the three. Is that right? He can't, yeah, he's a, yeah, that's what these guys do. That's their perfect cover.

Yeah. I mean, especially back then, too, people didn't know that preachers could be bad guys too really so they could this was a great front kept it kept it on the on the low huh oh i don't know how it's a small town and you're the preacher so everyone knows you if you're out drinking gambling carousing everyone's got to know that you're doing that everyone's got to know that

um just a cowboy he just goes to the places where basically no one will admit that they were there too maybe there's also one of those yeah if you see me there then we're both in this together of, if you take one Mormon, or to do anything, you have to take two because they keep an eye on each other. Exactly. Yeah, otherwise. But if one does it, the other one will do it too.

Yeah. And then they fucking just mums the word. That's it. Yeah, and if you get a third one in there, then forget about it. No one's doing anything. You're about to have a problem. Then they're just going door to door

trying to convert people. Yeah. You're going to be tithing by the end of this trip. That's how it works. Somebody's going to be tithing. So basically, yeah, he'd fire and brimstone on Sunday morning. and then, you know, afterwards lose the family's bill and food money at the, at the tables. Like, he's wild.

Now, when Blanche was nine, about 1942, so this is like, you know, Second World War time, we're mobilizing at this point. The family moves to Burlington, which was a textile town here, and that's where she will stay and live for a long, long time. Now, most of, besides, this is all. undisputed the stuff we've said so far. Dad definitely worked at the mills, definitely a Baptist breacher, and definitely

a womanizer, carouser, gambler, you know, whatever the fuck. Now, the rest of the stuff that happens to Blanche only comes from Blanche herself. Not saying that we have no reason to believe or disbelieve her. I'm just saying that when I try to give sources, the source of this is not, her

brothers and sisters don't back this up, but they don't say it's not true either. Nobody really says anything about it. This is just biograph. Autobiographical, yeah. So, yeah, from her. So basically she said that when her dad lost money and couldn't pay the debts, basically he would sell her when she was a young teenager to pay the debts. She'd have to go fuck some guy to pay off a debt. That sounds, if that's true, that is as horrific as a thing as possible.

What's worse? Yeah. That's so bad. We know her dad's a hypocrite, so I mean, I don't know how much farther is this down the line from how much of a hypocrite he is anyway. So, yeah. Hey, everybody just going to take a quick break from the show and tell you how to get a better habit going with fume. Try fume.fum.fum.com. Oh, these fume is great stuff.

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That seems terrible. Highly possible, because I've just heard a lot of bad things. Like, her father was just a bad guy and a mean guy and a nasty guy. So, yeah, she said she was both psychologically and sexually abused, which I think that act falls under that pretty wide umbrella of both of those things. Yeah. Now, the other thing about Blanche, and this is what makes me also believe this, is back then, if you were a young lady born in 1933, unless you were, like, grew up in a rail station or something, you didn't talk about sex or anything like that. You know what I mean? Even Rizzo and Greece was a little, you know,

innuendo and shit like that. She wasn't like sticking in me, big boy. Let's go. Balls deep. So it wasn't graphic. You know what I mean? My dad's sister is still that way. Or my grandfather's sister is still that way.

Telling people to my great aunt. Stick it in her? She doesn't talk about anything like that. Oh, about that's anything that's uncouth or unacceptable. She is so prim and proper, it's adorable. Yeah, she sits at the table. It's like, I've taken a turkey. I've taken a dick bigger.

that turkey like. You said that and I'm like, oh my God, I got to meet your aunt. She sounds hilarious. She is pretty amazing. She is proper. We played cards against humanity and she was red-faced. Oh, I bet. Yeah, that's going to do.

She was so upset. The only reason you guys played was to see how red her face would get too. So upset Aunt Judy. She was not happy. Well, apparently Blanche when she was young and we're talking teenager. We're talking mid-40s here. Yeah. In the mid-40s, I mean, there was none of that shit.

They said that she would could go pretty much mid-sentence in the same breath from quoting scripture to talking extremely graphically about sex, like graphic, graphic. And there's no internet. I don't even know where you would go to find a magazine about sex back then. I mean, for a teenage girl to know any of this shit, it's because it was done to her. That's the only way. You got to be introduced. Yeah, little orphan Annie wasn't talking about this on the. the radio. You know what I mean? This is the mid-40.

Yeah, I don't remember that. I don't remember that in the fireside FDR chats. Come on. Let's tell you about the war. And, by the way, let the guy do it on your face. It'll give him confidence to go fight the Nazis. Yeah. I've never heard that. And he says those dimples above her ass are thumb holders. They're thumb holders.

And you can fill, they also make wonderful jizzpools. So, in May of 1952, this is May 29th, 1952. She's 19 and she gets married. And if I'm her, I'm marrying the first fucking guy I can to get out of this goddamn house. And that's what a lot of people did back then. That's one of the reasons why there's so many young marriages back then is because they just needed to get out of whatever shit house they were from. She marries a guy, and this is the weird part. You would expect her to find a very bad guy to marry. A bitch of a man. A horrible alcoholic or, you know, somebody that something's under the surface.

She marries a guy named James Napoleon Taylor. James Taylor. He's seen fire and he's seen rain. And here he is now. Marion Blanche. Yeah, he's a Korean war veteran. And so he must have just got home from the war. He's a furniture restorer by trade.

Oh, that's a very patient man. That's a complete opposite. Like, that's a very patient, very meticulous and caring. Not an ounce of arthritis in that house. Oh, not at all. But there will be. Someday. They said that he's just a real ordinary, and he's described by everybody as a very decent man.

Yeah. Not an alcoholic, doesn't beat her, doesn't do anything. He's just a nice guy who goes and restores your credenza and then comes home, and he's fine. So now they're going to have two daughters that we'll talk about here. They have a daughter in 1953 named Vanessa Dale Taylor. and then they'll have another daughter in 1959 named Cindy. So in 1954, Blanche takes a job, and this is going to be her career. She's going to stay here for decades.

She takes a job at the Kroger's. And if you don't know what Kroger is. Is that an early time for that store? I think North Carolina is the home of Kroger. Is it? I think so. You might be right. I think it's like the baser, Virginia.

something, but that's where they started, was North Carolina. Because I remember my dad lived there. You'd go to a Kroger, and they'd say they'd been here for decades. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So my brother lived in Arkansas, and it was huge there. It's big. Yeah, it's big in the south and the mid-south area around there. So she takes a job there in 1954. Croger is a big grocery chain, by the way, if you don't know. It's the biggest in the country now. They bought fries and they bought all that other. They brought King Supers and Colorado. They bought everything. But they've kept, for the most part, the brand names that they were, they've kept those on

and not change them to Kroger. But a lot of times you're shopping at a Kroger store. You're buying Kroger shit off the shelf at that store. Their store brand stuff is not bad, some of it, too. They have decent store brand shit. The actual Kroger brand shit was, I remember it being good. I don't know about now, but that was 20 years ago when my dad lived out there. So anyway, she goes to work as a cashier at the Kroger supermarket in Burlington.

Okay. And that's an important job back then. The cashiers are your eyes and your, they're the face of your store. customers, there's no scanner. They're typing it in. They're having a chat with the customers. They know everybody. They know you codes.

They know everything. Yeah, they were, yeah, they're typing in. I mean, that's, they've got to be really good to not fuck up. Fuck, yeah. That's impressive. So she's really good at her job. And by 1959, she is promoted to what was then the highest position available to a woman at the Kroger chain.

Head checker. Head cashier. Hey. Yep. Your sarcasm is true. Yeah. That's exactly right. Unbelievable.

Head cashier. You collect the receipts from the other fucking women and then hand them to that guy. That's her job now. Thanks a lot. Do everything that that guy doesn't want to do. Yeah. People wonder why women are fucking pissed off sometimes and it's like shit like that probably. The best job in the store doesn't start with manager.

Nope. Or even assistant. Just head. Yeah. Man. So 1962 at Kroger. She meets a man. Now, she's married, obviously, to James Taylor here.

Yeah. Before Carly Simon got out of him and wrote songs. So she, it's 1962, but she meets a man named Raymond Carlton Reed, R-E-I-D. He's a manager here. He'll eventually run his home store. He'll be the big manager of a store here. He's a married man with kids as well, of course. Yeah.

But, of course, they have an affair. Now, we don't know when this affair starts. This affair starts. This fairer starts, I just said. I put the A for me. This affair starts. When is this affair to start? I want to ride it a fetus wheel.

So they, we don't know when it happened because they met in 62. A lot of people say it started in 63. And there are some accounts that put it as late as 1969. Either way, it still sounds like in the 60s. Love at first sight. Yeah, they're together. Now, but there are a lot. They're in it a lot here from the mids.

Either way, he put it mid-60s on. Now, in 1966, over the summer of 1966, Blanche does something very unexpected here. She has not spoken to her father since she got married. Yeah? She left the house and said, fuck you. In the 50s. In the 50s. In the 50s.

Which also makes me believe what she said was true. Yeah. Yeah. Because if he was just a gambler and, you know, fucked other women outside, daughters will forgive that. You still come back for Christmas. You come back for Christmas. Dad's a jerk.

Don't let him get too drunk, whatever. But unless he pimped you out, you're not going to. Yeah. Sold you to cover his gambling debts. That's like even grosser, isn't it? Yeah. And this isn't like now where people just disconnect from, you know, their families. In the 50s, nobody really did that.

But, you know, even no matter how terrible your family was, you. It's my favorite trend that we can do now. Isn't it great? So amazing. It is great. Oh, God. You not have to talk to those people? fucking awesome.

Yeah, well, hey, I checked all around. There's no cords attached. I can just not talk to you with being a jackass. What am I putting up with this shit for? For years. What were we doing?

Fucking crazy. So she reconciles with her dad. She went to see him. She made peace with him and started seeing him on her more of a regular basis here in the summer of 66. And also, from her,

I have two little girls. He ain't coming near those kids. Yeah, it's more forgiveness than I've got to fucking spare. Absolutely. One of her daughters is like 13 at this point or 12 or something. You're not coming near my kid. Not a chance. Nowhere near.

Nope. Then on September 18th, 1966, P.D. Kaiser, her father, at 62 years old, drops dead. Okay. So, I mean, he's a hardcore alcoholic and everything else. So this is... Perhaps she was privy to some news about some health complications and she just wanted to... Make peace with something and not have to deal with that for the rest of our life. Absolutely.

That's super. And 62 in 1966, not a bad run either. Pretty good run. The life expectancy was not 76 in 1962. It was way less. This is before. 55, 60? I think it was about in the, about that.

About that. Because, I mean, this is before a lot of the drugs that keep you alive, cholesterol things, heart things. And the EPA. And the EPA of that too. Yeah, environmentally, it was terrible. the smog, the poison and water and shit like that. And also just the shit people ate back then. Sure.

It was normal to smoke two packs a day in your place while you drank a bunch of booze and ate fried beef constantly every goddamn day. So that was normal. And this is before like a lot of heart surgeries were, came up with yet or anything like that. So the official cause of death is a heart attack. And everyone goes, that seems right. Sure.

Yeah. Probably had a few grits. Yeah. And he had symptoms too. People said before he died, he had violent stomach cramps and he was projectile vomiting and was kind of delirious, which can be heart attack symptoms as well. Really? The stomach issues, vomiting, things like that can proceed a heart attack. And also, he was drinking a lot, too.

So they didn't know how much he was drinking and how much that contributed to it as well. One weird thing, though, was his face turned bright blue. at one point. Bright blue. Bright blue before he died. His face was blue, so they thought maybe he just had lack of oxygen, that kind of thing.

But either way, heart attack, 62, in the ground, that's that. PD is dead. He's dead. Now, interesting. Now, Thursday, November 25th, 1970. It's Thanksgiving Day.

Okay? Now, James Taylor, Taylor's mother, Isla, Isla. Isla? It could be Ila. Ila, maybe, yeah. Well, her, Mrs. Taylor, we'll call her.

Mrs. Taylor, Isla, Isla, Ila, Isla, Ila, Taylor, who's Blanche's mother-in-law, on this day, she dies on Thanksgiving Day. Oh, no. She's 83 years old. I mean, 83. Just a bummer that it's that day. It sucks.

Yeah, the families that we're having, you know, she probably, imagine a better stuffing was still good. though. You know what I mean? They ate it and they're like, she was dying and made this great stuffing still. Damn it. As long as she didn't drop the gravy boat and we're all out of gravy now. That would be terrible. Pshah, thanks a lot. Hold on. Grandma? Grandma? Wake up, lady. Wake up, grandma. You got to make more gravy. We're going to have to dip the mashed potatoes in your shirt. Grandma, you drop the gravy. You got to make, grandma? We're out of gravy now, you're sloff. Who else knows how to make gravy? Who else knows how to make gravy?

Anybody, please? So, yeah, and this is, she's 83. She's born in the 1800s. Jesus. They don't even ask what happened to her. They show up, she's a corpse. They take her out, throw her in the ground. I mean.

You realize they're going to do that. Absolutely. Well, I hope I live long enough to her they do that. This thing's from the 1900s. Throw it out. I would love. Great. Sounds good.

Because that's about right. That would be like about 2000. If it's 2017 and they just go, hey, great, throw me in the garbage. I don't care. It's from the 1900s. If I live that long, I'd be thrilled for that. But that's what they would do. They'd walk in and they go, Jesus Christ, we're surprised she didn't turn to dust after she died.

And they'd pull her out and throw her in the ground. Holy shit. So, yeah, that's it. She dies. You know, James is sad. And Blanche comforts him. And that's that. She just lost her father a few years back.

She knows the feeling. They can commiserate. In the early 1970s, now, Blanche and Raymond Reed from the Kroger there, they've been carrying on an affair for years. Still going. They're still going strong by the early 70s. Through all of this stuff, she's also having an affair the whole time. Nobody knows? Nobody knows.

Nobody suspects it. They live very close to the vest kind of lives. Nobody's wild or whatever. They're satisfying whatever each other needs and it just doesn't grow. Somewhere in here, Raymond Reed divorced his wife, actually, during this whole thing. So during this, he's now divorced, so he's a single guy. He can do everything he wants. And he's still staying with her.

And she is still married here. Then September of 1973 comes around. Okay. In September 1973, James Taylor starts showing. flu-like symptoms. He's 45 years old. So, I mean, he's not an old man. He's not a super young man either.

We get sick. We get sick sometimes. So start showing flu-like symptoms, nausea, weakness, you know, flu. That's late September, 1973. October 2nd, 1973, James Taylor died. Oh, no. Yes. A week later?

Dead. Yeah. Had a heart attack. Uh-huh. And basically they put it down to he had heart failure after a pretty severe bout of the flu. Yeah. Which happens. Sure.

That is a, you know, thing that happens. Had it real bad they thought the flu and what we can decide. In your 40s, if you don't fucking take care of a flu, a cough, it will get worse. Yeah, you can drop dead from the flu or you can be LeBron James. That's what's so weird about your 40s. You can be. It's crazy. even Kyle Bush.

I'm talking, you can be like a just an incontinent fat doesn't move guy who looks 65 if you're 45 or you can still play in the NBA. It's the weirdest fucking age in the world to be there. So every time. So anyway, that's what happens there. So he's dead now. So she's had some tragedy happen kind of follow her around the last few years. So now she's a widow. and she and Raymond Reed now date publicly because they're both single.

May as well? Might as well. So they stuck together. And apparently this is like the romance of her life. You know what I mean? She's been with this guy. And this has a real, you know, we had to sneak around for years for a decade. And now we can be together and all that.

Well, now we know how to love each other and we just get to do it in the open eyes. That's great. Exactly. So she said also she probably would have married. Raymond, except that she wanted to be, stay in Burlington to be by her family and that he, as a manager and Kroger keeps getting transferred around to different stores. So she doesn't want to move, move from town to town. Yeah.

Because he was in Durham for a bit. And she went with him to Durham for a brief stint in the 70s, but didn't like it. Went back. He was in Durham and Winston-Salem and all that kind of shit. Now, by the 80s, they're still together, but they're not really, they're not as in love as they were at one point. The luster's gone. It's a little gone. Yeah, the bloom is off the rose here.

It's a little wilty now. She was telling her psychiatrist at the time that her feelings toward him had just gone away from love. And now she can't stand him, really. Oh, you know. We don't even like him. Now we like hate him now because he's, you know, that's how some people are. They're either love or hate. They don't really have a middle ground when it comes to relationship.

There's no reason to hate? Just tired of him. Just spend 20 years. And now he's available and she's available. So, you know, yeah, it's kind of not as dirty anymore. You know what I mean? Now it's legal. She's not fine.

She's like, just fuck me in the back of the car in a motel parking lot for like, for old time's sake. You know what I mean? Go get married again. Yeah. Hey. There's a nice lady just moved it down. So January of 1985, Blanche's house burns down in Berlin. Oh, no.

Yeah, this is Calamity Blanche here. It's just following her. It is insured, luckily, for her. So she collects the insurance, and with that money, she buys a trailer. So now she's a trailer owner, which... Not bad. It's something. Yeah.

That's fine. And she's like 50, too. Like her kids are out. out of the house. Yeah. If you don't want the maintenance of a fucking house. Yeah. She's a great option in your, in her 50s and 60s.

Yeah. She's downsizing at this point. Yeah. You know, that's all. Then February, 1985, a month after she bought the trailer, the trailer burns down too. Okay.

Yeah. She says that she basically tells the police that there's a guy, she doesn't know who he is, but there's been a, quote, a pervert stalking her for a while. There's a perverted firebug somewhere. Some perverted fire bug that gets horny like David Berkowitz. He gets horny over fire.

Starting a fire. And she said that it had to be this guy because he started being like stalking her and then her house burned down when she put down to coincidence. But now that this place burned down too, she's like, it's got to be this fucking guy burning my house down here. So then that year on October, in October, October 16th, 19th, 1885, Blanche Taylor sues Kroger and an employee of Kroger for sexual harassment. What year?

1985. You got to really harass an 85, right? Oh, yeah. Well, this is when you started to be able to sue for that kind of shit, at least at this time. This was when, like, that was like a big joke. If you watch any, like, SNL from the mid-80s, every goddamn sketch is like, sexual harassment. That was the big. the hot topic of the day.

But it was, this is, this is about, like this is as early as it gets for that shit. Yeah, to actually have people be on your side.

And not say, hey, lighten up, Tuts. Yeah. It was the old cheer up bitch in the, in the 50s and 60s.

That's what it was. Hey, take it as a compliment that I grabbed your ass. It means it's nice. You know, that's how they used to actually. Take your ass over and get me a coffee.

Yeah. Well, why don't you let me take a look at it while you go over there. Now, she accuses a storeman named Robert Hutton, who everybody says she was having an affair with for a while, by the way, of sexual harassment. She files later a $15 million lawsuit against Groger.

Wow. Yes. Now, apparently people said that Robert J. Hutton, this guy she sued, was the regional manager for the Piedmont Triad. I don't know what the fuck that is, but he was a Kroger guy, I guess those stores. and apparently everybody said they were having a relationship for a minute here. Can you sexually harass your muse? I mean, if they're your fucking underling, I guess. You can't do it.

I guess you had to wait till we're in the dirty motel. You can't do it. That's what I mean. Yeah. I guess if it's your underling, really at any point they decide that it's not a good thing, it's now sexual harassment because you shouldn't have been fucking them to begin with your underling. That's the problem. Excellent points.

Yeah. So, yeah, I guess. This is the reason that you don't fuck people that you work with. That's another reason why you know, well, anyway, someone beneath you. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. An equal, you know, hey, go after it. Have fun.

Is that fair game? If it's all. If it's voluntary, if everyone's into it, yeah, I would think. How else does anybody meet anybody? I don't know. I just don't think it's right to fuck people at work. I think that's weird. I think, I don't think.

It happens all the time. I think that's where. Most people who don't meet on the internet, meet or work, I think. That's it. Yeah. That's where you're spending time with people. I'll bet there's more. Met my wife for work.

True. A bit more affairs happened, but you weren't her boss? I mean, neither you could have fucked with either. No, I was an independent contractor. She worked in the box office. I'm a comic coming in once a month. But the, I'll bet a huge, I'll bet the vast majority of affairs happen to start from work. Fuck yeah.

Absolutely. Right? That's the number one answer. Pre-social media? This is family viewed. Fucking Bing, Bing, Bing. Pre-social media? Pre-somebody somebody you knew in high school contacting you were some of all shit.

That's 100% now. That family feud, there's only one answer. Yeah, that's it. Yes. Okay. Well, that's all. Yeah, in 85, though, that's where you met people if you were married. There's nowhere else you go, really, to meet people.

So she files a suit against both him and the company. Now, they said that Blanche alleged that he had a long history of making advances and fondling other female clerks as well. Oh. She claims in the suit that he reached up her dress, exposed himself. These are two separate incidents, reached up her dress one time, which seems pretty aggressive. Let me see what you got going on up there. It's pretty crazy. I would say.

Exposing himself is also pretty forward. They're probably on par, right? Yeah. Yeah. I think I'd rather have, if I'm a woman, I'd rather have someone expose themselves. Then grab, yeah. Then grab me physically. Because at least I have a shot.

At least I can go. Yeah. And he'd probably pull his pants up and run away. Unless he's like a rapist in a parking lot. But like in a work environment, he probably wouldn't want you to. You can't snicker at being assaulted. No. No.

You have to try to stab someone in the face for that. That's horrifying. But both of them, terrible, especially if it's from your boss. Your boss shouldn't show you his dick ever. That's terrible. Not cool. Yeah, that's the worst day. That's a bad day.

Then in October 85, she says he grabbed her from behind in a conference room. She said that when she turned around, he was nude from the waist down and pointed at his dick and said, quote, are you ready for this? Oh, which is number one, insanely confident. And number two, absolutely a criminal act at this point in a goddamn office. I can't, are you ready for this? Okay. How can you? I mean, I mean, even in a, even in a, even in a, walks up to like Donald Duck. Even in a sexual environment, like in a hotel room or in your own bedroom. It's weird. I can never.

Imagine walking up with a shirt and probably a dress shirt too. Probably. A dress shirt with your dick. Hopefully, in his case, hanging below the bottom of it, I could only hope, saying. Or sticking out of the fucking scene. Yeah, sticking out of the flaps. Where the last button doesn't collapse. Yeah, I think he'll probably tuck them around the balls on the bottom.

I think that's how he keeps it. So the whole thing's displayed nicely. Are you ready for this? Oh, gosh. The confidence. That's so much confidence. It makes me sick. And it's also, it makes me sick to my stomach, man.

Imagine that. I've never considered that somebody couldn't be ready for it. Hey, you ready for this? Imagine doing that. Imagine walking up to another human being. How? And being like, what do you think? Huh?

I've never considered for a second that this might be overwhelming. Overwhelming. Have you steeled yourself for this? Are you ready for this? Yikes. Hold on. I better hold on to something. Good God.

She at this point said, and this is a great move on her part, by the way, she grabbed his pants and underwear and ran off, which is the greatest comeback for that that's ever happened. happened. He stepped out of them. That's as brave as it gets. Black socks pulled up to halfway up his calves with dress shoes and a dress shirt tucked around his balls. That's why he walked up. I hope he's wearing those male garters that hold him up. Oh, that would be great. Now that's the, that's the kicker if he's got those on. Garters from that way and then suspenders clipped on to his boxer shorts as well.

Walk that shit out of his room, sir. Well, she said she grabbed his pants and underwear and fled from the store and that he had to leave in a meat cutter smock, which is hilarious. Which is hilarious. Not the room. Because his ass would be showing in a meat cutter smock. See you got blood and visceral all over. All right. Well, it's been a long day.

I'll see you later. He walks away. His ass is just showing. That would be, this is ridiculous. This is police academy for Christ's sick. That's what it's turned into. Yeah. This fucking Sergeant Harris is going to come up and mess with us.

Call Commandant Lassard, somebody. So Blanche never returned to work after that. And three months later filed a sexual harassment suit. She said it was very debilitating the whole thing. So in the lawsuit here, they said that she was, quote, completely alienated and antagonistic toward men now based on this. So that's part of her suffering here. She could no longer maintain meaningful contact with the opposite sex is what she said. she was afraid they were going to ask if they were ready for something.

I mean, I don't want to discount what she went through here, but let's also pepper in what she went through as a child. And this is the trigger? Yeah, yeah. That's shocking. It is shocking. No, she, so that's what she said, and she said, you know, that's, I can't have contact. I can't work anymore.

And so the Hutton guy was forced to resign, which in the 80s is a huge win, because in the 80s, That means it happened, man. Well, that means at least the company believed it happened. Yeah. They made him resign. I mean, but either way, it's hard because they were having an affair, too. So it's, I mean, so he would know if she was ready for it technically or not. Right.

Which is weird. He certainly overstepped in a lot of different ways. Absolutely. Or, as we get into Blanche. Oh. Or she, we don't know. That's the thing with Blanche. You never know with Blanche.

She felt slided and was done. Yeah, I mean, I hate to discuss. This all sounds very specific. I mean, she's got specific things, but then everybody else was like, they're having an affair for months before that. What are you talking about? Like, that's what a lot of the store employees said during the lawsuit. So it was kind of, it was tough. So who knows here?

We'll find out. Now, at the same time here, she is seeing, obviously still seeing Raymond Reed and has a new boyfriend as well. Oh? A Baptist, or he's a United Church of Christ. minister. Oh. Named Dwight Moore, the Reverend Dwight Moore. They met during an Easter sunrise service in April of 85.

Res resurrected her love. That's right. That's absolutely right. She's going to make something else rise, too. So they met here. Now, he's divorced already. This guy. He is a pastor of a small United Church of Christ Congregation out in rural Alamance

County. So they started just meeting for meals And she's not married to Raymond Reed I mean she's been with him for 20 years But technically these are two single people Okay And so they don't Yeah, IRS sees it that way

Exactly they don't have to like hide or anything So they start going to meals And she's a church-going widow lady And he's a divorced country preacher And you know, they're going to find each other About the same age, age-appropriate people And this seems like a nice thing that they found each other.

And she at this point, by the way, and we took a little bit of flack, people not understanding that we were joking. A few weeks ago when we had a, like a 27-year-old guy who was hanging out with a woman in her mid-50s for money, obviously, that relationship was, and we were making jokes about that.

And some of our audience got upset about that because they were like, hey, I'm 55 or whatever. What are you talking about? And it's like, well, You know what we're talking about. We're joking. Yeah, we're making jokes. That's the point of the show.

Yeah, we're joking. So in the mid-80s, someone over 50 is way different than someone over 50 now. Way different. They look it. Yeah. Nowadays, there's people in their 50s that look like they're 40. They look young. Back then, people in their 50s embraced.

Looking older. And they, my grandmother. Old people when they were in their early 60s. My grandma was 56 in, I don't know what year, but that's all I see her as. And 56 to me was so elderly because she looked 85. That's what I mean. And it's the way they dress, the way they did things. She has gray hair in the like the perm.

In the perm. She's got the gray hair. She's got the big glasses like the old age has. She's wearing a fucking askot. With the chain, with the, you know, the glasses. change. She dresses in like white lacy shirts like a church lady. She looks like she's like now if you saw her, you'd go

and go, hey, she'd probably like 72. Right. But she was like 53. So it's very interesting. I never saw my grandma's cleavage ever. She never dressed like, you know what I mean? Like a going out lady. She was always... My grandmother was a huge slut popping cleavage everywhere. You saw titty?

No, absolutely not. But I mean, she always had a fucking askot or a... Oh, really? And a brooch. And she always... My grandmother. Italian grandma would show a little cleavage But she's Italian I mean

You know what I mean? I mean, yeah They wear a shirt A v neck of some sort They're not shy about My grandmother never did Yeah, they're not shy My other grandmother

I don't think she had any body at all I don't think she was just a You know I think she was just smooth under there Just a head Just an old lady, that's all Just a head that yelled at me Just an old lady who shouted racial slurs

That's all she was I don't know Yeah So she You know she's hanging out with this Reverend Dwight Moore, and she's seen as very grandmotherly. That's it.

She is a grandmother at this point, and she acts like it and looks like it. Sure. New Year's Eve, December 31st, 1985. Okay. Raymond Reed and Blanche are spending New Year's Eve together. She's, it's a real night. She's making a pot of homemade potato soup.

Nice. I fucking love a potato soup. Hell yeah. Potato and soup together. Count me in. That's great. It's always creamy. That's delicious.

Love it. It's always so good. So good, good, so good. So just a nice evening in with a pot of tomato or potato soup. It sounds great. The problem is, by the early morning hours of January 1, 1986, Raymond Reed, who is usually not a sick guy. He just doesn't really get sick.

He's a guy who can eat anything and not get sick. He doesn't get a lot of colds. He's one of those guys. Is really in bad shape. He's got horrible nausea. He's vomiting. He's got diarrhea. Oh.

Yeah, he's like you if she put like five eggs in the soup. Oh, essentially. This is what a turnpike chicken egg soup. Oh, man. That's the best, the worst, man. Can't have that. What's in this?

Well, potatoes, turnpike chicken. It's everything. Eggs. So he gets very sick. And he's going to kind of stay pretty sick for the next few months. Oh, no. And he's a guy who never missed work. He's known to never miss a day of work.

And he all of a sudden. misses over the next three months, he misses like four weeks of work all put in together. It just goes through periods of being sick. He'd be okay. He'd recover. He'd go back. Then he'd be sick again. So, I mean, and he's not a guy

that likes to go to the doctor, and people are telling him, he might have a stomach tumor or something. You've got to get this checked out. Like, you could have a gastrointestinal problem here. Because, I mean, he'd be for days, he wouldn't be able to keep food down. Terrible. And then he'd come back and say, I must have caught a

bug. I don't know. Even when I'm egg poisoned, it's like two hours of insane sick, but it's never like that. I'm not throwing up blood and stuff. Yeah, yeah. It's and it looked tough and he was like, I mean, you know, he's like 50 at this point, too, in his early mid-50, so he's thinking, Christ,

probably just my body falling apart. That's all. Just getting old type of thing. He takes it as he couldn't quite make out the menu up at McDonald's there like he used to. What was it say for Big Mac? Was that 419? Okay. Having a problem. Big Mac looks like Big Mac.

now. That's a big, what is that? Big mag you guys got there? So May 30th, 1986 here. That's when he finally goes to the hospital to get checked out.

So, I mean, he, like five whole months, he went back and forth being sick and not feeling good before he went to the hospital. This is the Wesley Long Hospital in Greensboro. And he went to see his doctor, Dr. Norman Garrett. And he tells the doctor that a week earlier he'd gotten violently ill

while eating and hasn't been able to keep solid food down since. And he said, and not this has been going on for months on and off, basically. I keep getting these things. So they call it acute gastroenteritis at first. Okay. Because he says that the doctor said he is dehydrated.

He's nausea, vomiting meets all the criteria. I hate that medicine calls something like that acute because acute mathematically means small. It means small. And this is, this means extreme out of no one. Yeah, but I guess it means targeted at a, at an area, I would assume. And out of nowhere. And out of nowhere.

Yeah, yeah, that too. Yeah, it's got medically and it definitely has different. Medical definitions are way different than regular definitions, too, the way they're used. That word, though, makes me fucking not give a shit. Yeah. But it means you better give a shit. It means very bad. Yeah.

Now, a fellow Kroger employee who knows both of them, obviously, Raymond and Blanche here, Her name is Gloria Head. She visits and notices something in Blanche's purse, which was a little Tupperware. By the way, in the 50s or 60s, Blanche also sold Tupperware. She had Tupperware parties and shit like a lot of the women did. She has a Tupperware, little Tupperware of red jello in her purse. So, I mean, Grandma carries jello. Who cares, right?

But the doctor had noted that Raymond Reed told him he, started vomiting the night before after eating jello. Oh. But, I mean, that doesn't, that doesn't, he could have been sick and then that's when it came out. We don't know. So she just noticed that. She's like, why did you keep the jello if it made him sick? Right.

We don't know. It made him sick. June of 86. Okay. He keeps getting worse, Raymond Reed while he's in the hospital. He's not doing well. He gets worse and worse and worse. They revised the diagnosis to multiple systems failure.

which is up in the ante a bit. And out of nowhere is horrifying. That's an acute upping of the ante right there. It's not good. Listen to his symptoms. Okay. Excessive nausea and vomiting. Loose stools.

Don't want that. Skin rash. Okay. Adema. Dehydration. Bone marrow damage. That's inside your bones. The bone marrow is damaged.

inside it, blood cell abnormalities, electrolyte imbalance, progressive shortness of breath, respiratory failure, racing heartbeat, plummeting blood pressure, kidney shut down, and numbness and tingling in his hands and feet.

What's he gargling water from the Congo or something? Yeah, fucking Flint, Michigan 10 years ago. This is, yeah, he drinks from a puddle in Bangladesh. That's how it works.

It's the only water drink. He's got to get it. It comes. It's tough to get. It's tough to get. One company makes it and you got to shake it because it's chunky. But there's like a, you know, just like a loose nail in there once in a while. If you don't mix it up, the bottom half, you got to chew.

Oh, you got to chew. Yeah. Every once in a while, if I just find like a child's toe in there or something, you go, well, that's what's in there. What the fuck? Why they're healthy people. That's a crazy diagnosis. That's crazy. That is like by June 1st, 85.

That's what's going on. Then by June 5th, or 86, I'm sorry, June 5th, 1986, about a week later, he's feeling much better now. Oh? His body's starting to recover here. Things look up briefly. The doctor tells Blanche and Raymond that, you know, he's only going to need a few more days in the hospital. And he's probably going to be strong enough to go home and just, yeah, whatever we're doing is working. Your body's coming back here.

Then over the next week, he got. It gets worse instead of getting better. Plumments. The doctor said it was life-threatening and ships him off to a bigger hospital now. Oh, my God. Yeah, out of his care. This is June 13, 1986. He ends up at North Carolina Baptist Hospital in Winston-Salem.

Oh. Now, this is in a different county, by the way, here from where we were. This is in, yeah, this is a different county. So now the doctor there, Dr. Robert Hamilton, is a specialist in internal medicine. and nephrology. And he treated Raymond Reed at the hospital and said that Raymond was admitted with a number of symptoms, including a raspy voice, severe swelling in his lower extremities, anemia, low white blood cell count, a rash over his lower extremities, white patches in his mouth, very poor bowel sounds. I mean, he's farting, but they're not good ones. You know what I mean?

Like, I like a nice, give me a trumpet rip. These are kind of sad. You know what those sound like. Bowels, yeah. That's when it claps and it's good. Like it's leaking out like air out of a like a basketball you ran over. It's like a wet water balloon. Not great.

Wow, very poor bowel sounds. I've never heard that as a medical thing on this 700-something episodes of this show. That's never come up before. difficulty breathing and signs of kidney failure. Okay. So he continues to get worse and worse and worse here. They come up with a new theory. Okay.

Now, I hope I'm going to pronounce this even close to right. This is Gia B-A-B-R-A-R-A-S-R-E syndrome. It's spelled G-U-I-L-L-A-I-N-B-A-R-E. accent. So that's how... French? I guess. That's why it's Gia,

because that's the pronunciation of it. I had to look that up. That is a syndrome. That's the diagnosis they give him. Gia Barre syndrome. It's a neurological condition

that causes all of these things, basically. And it looks like it has a pretty good umbrella control over the whole body here. That's what your brain, right? That's, yeah, neurological. Your brain and the pathways.

Yeah. Everything. start fucking up? Everything fuck up now. Yeah. The main computer on your car goes. The next thing you know, your gas tanks popping open and your windshield wipers are going, you're like, what's happening right now?

Yeah. Yeah. So that's the theory now. Now, I looked up this to get a little bit deeper. This is according to what the Mayo Clinic.com here says about this syndrome, a condition in which the body's immune system attacks the nerves. Oh, my God. Sounds bad.

It can cause weakness, numbness, or paralysis. weakness and tingling in the hands and feet are usually the first symptoms. These sensations can quickly spread and may lead to paralysis. In its most serious form, the syndrome is a medical emergency. Most people with the condition need treatment in a hospital. They say it's a rare syndrome and the exact cause is not known. That's today. Even less known 40 years ago, obviously.

They said, but two thirds of people have symptoms of an infection in the six weeks before the symptoms of this syndrome begin. And those infections can include respiratory or gastrointestinal infections and things like that. Either way, the diagnosis is you're fucked. You're fine. And it can even be caused by the Zika virus even. Oh, shit. That can trigger this as well.

There's no known cure for it. Several treatment options can ease symptoms and help speed recovery. Most people recover completely, but some serious instances can be fatal. So, frightening. Frightening is what this sounds horrible. Your body just decides, I'm going to fuck with you. Look, at that time, what are you going to do? That's not a lot of, what are you going to do?

It's 85. Your body's failed. It really has. I mean, this is, it's a lot. So they say recovery may take up to several years, but most people are able to walk again six months after symptoms for, able to walk again. This is, this is. I came in here. With diarrhea, now we're talking about I might not walk again.

Now we're talking about here's your wheelchair. Now, this is how it works. You're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Those are some very unwell sounding bowels. I just had Arby's earlier. That's what I'm here for. This is crazy. You want to put me in a wheelchair.

I ate jello. And now you're talking about I may not walk again. Holy shit. So they say also some people may have lasting effects such as weakness and numbness or fatigue. So this can carry on. Good God. Basically, anything, it ranges from recover pretty quickly to drop dead to being paralyzed, like anywhere in between there. It's a very vast.

All because your brain just chose it. Just chose to, yeah, chose to your motherboard fried, man. It just started going against itself. June 21, 1986. This is 16 days after he was almost better and ready to go home, okay? Yeah. Now there's a code blue. He crashes.

Oh. Code blue. so they intubate him and put him on a ventilator. Wow. Okay. Over the next few days, he becomes nearly completely paralyzed. Fuck.

Okay. Now, so they try a procedure called plasma ferrous, pharis. Plasma ferrisis. Okay. Which is basically washing your blood. I feel like this is what like Keith Richards had done every three weeks while he's on the road. Keep him going this long. Just give me a whole new.

A batch, everybody. It is a... Now, I put the heroin in the one arm, put it with the other. The washer in the other. It'll swirl around, man. It'll be a good high. Wash your blood, like there's brushes or something. Yeah.

I don't know why I pictured, like, tiny, tiny microscopic elves doing it. Like, while they're singing. Well, they have little brushes. To that or you eat a tide pod, James. One of the two. Give it a shot. Why not? And he improves a little bit.

Mm-hmm. Okay, then June 27th and 28th, 86 here. A urine sample is taken from Raymond Reed and it goes to the lab. So the problem is this urine sample where they're just looking for anything in his body that could be causing this. The results never reached the doctor that is treating him. This is just bureaucratic fuck up here. Well, it turns out that they don't find out how this happened to later, but there was a resident response. for this. As hospitals run on kind of almost free labor a lot as these residents, they depend on

them a lot. And the residents obviously need it to become doctors. So it all works out. But this resident here, they rotate them a lot. I don't know if now, but at least back then they were. And the he was rotated to a different hospital the way the day the result came in. And the new person coming in to fill their spot didn't know anything about it. And it just got thrown in a drawer. and nobody ever saw the results. Is that Abergnell guy? He just looked at it and said, I concur. Yeah, there you go.

He just put it away and was like, I don't know what the hell this is. This is before my time. Fuck. That's the way it works. So that is fucking horrible. So no one ever saw what happened, okay, with the results. And we'll find out in a minute here.

The problem, well, might as well tell it now, actually. Yeah. The problem with the results are, they say that he has, quote, quite elevated levels of arsenic in his urine. Yeah. How do you get that? From arsenic, I would assume.

Yeah. That's the only way. Yeah. So July through September 86, okay, he gets better. He gets some movement back. He can breathe on his own. And he's starting to do better, you know, because he was in a seriously, you know, blocked things like I see you from him.

He's intubated and fucking paralyzed. He's doing so much better. that Blanche asked the doctor if, could I please bring him, could he, I know he's had to have all the, you know, you've had to give him certain things, but can he have food from home now? The poor guy misses his home cooking and he's in a, how do you expect him to recover if he can't even eat the foods he loves

and, you know, gets his strength up? And the doctor said, well, of course, yeah, if he, you know, if he's strong enough to eat, then why not? I'd rather have him have home cooking he's used to there. So, you know, she says, of course, you know, so she does, and he's recovering. And she's sitting there by his son. holding his hand, you know, talking to him even when he couldn't talk, you know what I mean?

Putting blankets on him. Is he warm enough? Let's get him some socks, all that kind of thing. Is he eating enough? Is he warm enough? As you would want your significant other to help you with. You know what I mean? The hospital food went untouched. All the cooking was from, she'd bring home. She'd cook the night before and then bring home all the meals or bring all the meals to the hospital and everything like that. She brought iced tea, frozen yogurt, milkshake, soups, banana pudding, all that kind of thing. And then also, at some time in here, he signs his will making her a one-third beneficiary of his estate. One-third? One-third.

Because I think he has two kids, too. So I think he chopped it up like that. So, I mean, yeah, he's sitting by her side. She's sitting by a side showing her devotion to him and he decides to repay her that way. just in case things go badly for him. Sure. End of September, 1986, he suffers another setback. Damn it.

The doctors had started talking about sending him home like a couple of days before, and then it starts to get bad again. He'd come back, and now he's on death's door again, which is crazy. So this has happened like four different times where he might be able to go home soon, and then all of a sudden he takes a bad turn. Yeah. So he's essentially been in the hospital for like five months at this point. Horrible.

October 1st, 1986. This is the time this Elisa Hutchins, who's the head nurse in the ICU, which is much better than head cashier at Kroger's, by the way. Well, yeah. It's a big one. She makes better money. Yeah, that's a very important job. She says the last time she ever saw Raymond looking really well was October 1st. He was in the intermediate care unit.

was off the critical list and Blanche was right there feeding him his beloved banana pudding that she makes for everybody and all the neighbors love her banana pudding she brings it to the bake sales and the church carbs and all that shit October 3rd, 1986,

two days later, this Hutchins visits Reed again, the nurse, and he's in acute respiratory failure. Again? Again, or distress. And he's scared for his life and he said to her, please help me or I'm going to die. Right.

That's what he said to the nurse. October 4th through October 6th, 1986. Okay. Raymond Reed's son, Stephen, who was a student at East Carolina, visited his father. And he found that his father had eaten breakfast. And, you know, he stayed through the 5th and headed back to school. Then on Monday, October 6th, Blanche called the son and said, you better. or get back here as fast as you can.

He's taking a turn for the worse. He said that when he walked in that evening and he had seen him on Sunday, and this is Monday night, he said, he barely recognized him. Oh, he looked that bad. He said he looked like he'd gained 100 pounds overnight because he was so swollen.

Swollen. His whole body, his face. He said, this is horrifying. Stephen said his eyeballs were even starting to swell and his skin was splitting. Splitting. What does that? Like you're the fucking

the Hulk or the Wolfman or something Like your skin stretches a lot He's got Teen Wolf in there Think about that Yeah Yeah dude This is like Why would it be splitting?

I don't know if this is like some You know I didn't know there was anything that could do that God damn it the goddamn horror guy Who does who made the head's explode for scanners No no the The goddamn special effects guy, Savini.

Tom Savini. This is like a Tom Savini creation. Like swelling with the skin splitting. Yeah. Like this is horrifying. Only time I've ever heard of skin exploding like that is like falling off a building. I didn't know that you could just get sick and expand so much your skin rips. I mean, normally I guess you would expand at a slow rate so your skin would have time to catch up.

But I guess in one day, if you go from normal to blow up. your skin can't catch up. Yeah, it can't go from me to fat Albert and then expect it to hold it all. Women don't get all of their belly for nine months of pregnancy the day they turn pregnant. They would probably split and explode. Yeah. So, yeah, then October 7, 1986, a doctor said that Raymond Reed was progressively weaker and unable to continue his breathing on his own well enough to sustain life. So he was on heart drugs and a ventilator.

He could only communicate with his eyes. Blink? Once for yes, twice for no type of shit. In the early afternoon, he coded again. They did CPR. They tried to put emergency drugs through his heart. They did everything. And it was too late.

And he dies that day on October 7, 1986. This is the toughest son bitch I've ever heard of. And the worst year I've ever heard of. That's the worst 10 months I've heard of a human being living. That's awful. Awful. Fuck he fought. And it's the, what did I, how did I pronounce it?

The Guillain, Big Air, whatever the fuck it was. It's that syndrome is what's the cause of death there. So right after he's pronounced dead, several witnesses heard Blanche say something here. She was obviously distraught. And she said, they talked about, you know, maybe we do an autopsy to find out exactly what went on in there. And she's crying and says, we cannot have an autopsy. He's been through too much. He's been poked and prodded enough.

Leave him alone. You poke that swollen man. He's going to explode. You leave him alone. He's been through enough. God damn. So, yeah. Stephen said that Blanche told her, this is Raymond's son.

Stephen said that Blanche said, if any doctor asks us if we want to do an autopsy, let's say no. Your dad's been through enough pricking and poking. And if they didn't find out what was wrong with him in six months in the hospital, then it's their loss. Like, what are they, how are they going to find out now anymore if they couldn't figure it out in six months in the hospital?

Well, they weren't looking on his insides then. That's probably why. Because they can't, why cut his fucking chest to figure it out? Can't really take organs out

and stare at him in the light and shit and really get a good fander at them. They're lost. They're loss. So they bury him because, I mean, he has a cause of death

that he's been in the hospital. It's not a surprise. So they bury him at the Pine Hill, cemetery in Burlington here and that's that. No autopsy. No autopsy, no. They figured they knew what happened to them.

They didn't know how it happened, but they didn't know if they could find that out from an autopsy anyway. Because they were like, his brain control all deleted. That's it. It's all gone now. So the nurses said that Raymond had become their favorite patient. One said, quote, I can't explain why. I don't always get very close to my patients, but we all loved Raymond.

That's nice. He was that kind of guy. Now, remember I said how he signed over his estate? Yeah, apparently here, while Raymond was laying and this happened while he was in the hospital bed during one of his streaks where he was unable to speak. So Blanche's lawyer from her sexual harassment suit referred her to another lawyer to prepare a will for Raymond. Blanche handed the guy some notes. She said a nurse had written them and asked him to draft a will and a power of attorney based on these notes that she hands the guy. He drafted the documents and brought them to the hospital. Now, Raymond Reed couldn't talk.

All he could do is nod his head and squeeze a hand. Jesus. Yeah. So the nurses helped him interpret everything. And the lawyer asked in front of witnesses, the nurses, whether Reed understood that leaving his property to Blanche. his property to Blanche meant, you know, he was taking it out of his, away from his sons, basically, and whether he wanted Blanche to share in the insurance money. And he nodded yes to both.

Okay. He couldn't hold a pen, so the lawyer signed his name for him in front of a notary and two witnesses that he wanted him to do that. Sure, sure. You can do that. So that's what he did. That's how this happened while he was unable to even sign his name. Yeah. So Blanche, obviously, that's his dead man number two, three if you count her dad in her life.

Heartbreaking. So, I mean, but you got to move on. You can't just sit back and let life kick you in the balls every day. Well, especially if you're already going out with another guy, too. Yeah, you already got another boyfriend. That's kind of hard. So, yeah, now she just takes up with the good Reverend Dwight Moore. And they begin seeing each other publicly.

Now it's really out in the open, you know. They're two nice older people that are finding each other, and everyone thinks it's sweet, essentially. That's it. Look at them. Yeah, he says that he occasionally drove, by the way, Dwight occasionally drove Blanche to the hospital to see Reed. And he accompanied her to the funeral, which is Balsey. Oh, shit. That's a wild one.

Hey, everybody, if your spouse dies, don't bring a hook up to the funeral. That's a little weird. Yeah, that's just too much. In front of the kids? In front of the kids. Yeah, that's wild. So, I mean, she could say he's my pastor, though. That's the thing.

Yeah. He's helping me through this hard time. My spiritual advisor. Exactly. Helping me out here. Now, he says, this is old Reverend Moore here, I was very much involved with Blanche during the time of Raymond Reed's illness. She assured me it had never been a romantic.

romantic attachment between her and Raymond. They've been together for 20 years, not romantic. They're just... Never. Just hang out buddies. They're like the golden girls, basically. They just sit around, eat cheesecake, gossip. We had lunch one day, and he said, one day, put me down.

Yeah, that's all. So he said that they had just been friends and coworkers. She said their friendship was based on the fact that she led him to Jesus. Oh. She led him somewhere where he screamed Jesus, but it wasn't at church. I'll tell you that much. Yeah. He was yelling Jesus.

So here he is, you know, this guy, and he believes this, he said. So as far as he knows, they're just two devoutly religious people who found each other, and they both known loss. That's all. So maybe they'll get married. Wedding bells on the horizon for these two? May as well. Yeah. Well, on November 4, 1986, Dwight buys a $571 ruby and diamond engagement ring for Blanche.

How about that? That's a few grand now. Not bad. Yeah, that ain't nothing then. No, no, not at all. And they planned to marry, but the wedding kept getting postponed. November, 1988, they were on their way to get their marriage license, like on the way to the courthouse to get their license. And he threw up.

Oh. And she laughed and said, isn't this something? We're trying to get our marriage license. And you're so sick you can't even stay in the car. Are you trying to get out of this? Who do you pretend and you're sick to get out of this? You don't want to marry me and breaking balls. By the way, during this time, Blanche has some more calamities here.

She's diagnosed with breast cancer, she tells him in 1987. So they pushed the wedding back a little bit. July 29, 1987, Blanche accepts a settlement from Kroger. Really? Out of court? It isn't for $15,000. $275,000 she gets out of them. that's quite the settlement.

That's for them, that's a go away. Yeah. And for her, that's exactly what it is. That's enough money where she'll shut the fuck up, but not enough that it really affects their bottom line. And it also says kind of that they're not. They don't believe in her. That's what I mean.

Yes. They don't. Now, I mean, they're the defendant. So, I mean, that's not shocking that they wouldn't believe. And she also doesn't, it's also, now get out of our hair, but guess what, you're probably going to have to work again. Exactly, exactly. Or maybe.

Well, at her age, though, when you put that in some investments and stuff, you might be able to live off that for a while. In 87, possibly, but not much. For another 25 years, probably, if she had something else, a little 401K saved up or insurance from... In 87, did a 401k exist? I don't know when we started. Yeah, they had some kind of saving IRAs.

She better have some other income, is the point. That ain't enough. Yeah, no, I mean, it's tough. You could probably pull that off back then, I bet. Stretch it? If you lived in a trailer that you owned? Maybe, yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, you weren't going on with extravagant vacations.

With Social Security kicking in, too, in 10 years. You could probably make that do fine for you back then. It'll stretch, but not, I don't know. You're not going to live large or anything, but, you know. So, yeah, and then she develops that she says, now this is what she tells Dwight, a mysterious intestinal ailment again. Oh. I'm starting to think is there something in the house.

You know what I mean? If I'm the doctors, I'm like, where do you live? What's going on here? And she's got cancer. Do you have like a furniture that's just mold? Like a recliner that's just upholstered mold, essentially? Is that what you're doing here? Do you live on Bob Ross's set?

Yeah. Yeah, what do you do? What are you holding the fucking? The bat of holding the turpentine bucket or whatever. Cancer turpentine time? Yeah. So she, she said that this required two surgeries as well.

Oh. And she pushes the wedding date a little bit more. So November 26, 1988, they're supposed to get married that day, but it has to be canceled because this is when Blanche has to be hospitalized for nausea and vomiting. Oh. Something's going on. Yeah, it's not good. Now, April 19, 1989, the wedding finally happens.

Here we go. She becomes Blanche Kaiser Taylor Moore. It's so many names. It's so many. They went to where everyone goes on their honeymoon. New Jersey. Is that right? Oh, yeah.

Everyone knows. I believe it's probably Trenton. Everybody wants the glories of Trenton for their honeymoon, the romance, the intrigue. Probably Atlantic City. Patterson. Yeah. Probably Atlantic City or some shit or the shore. It's April.

You're not really going to the shore. So it's probably Atlantic City. I don't know where else you'd go in April. I don't know where you'd go in April. I don't know where you'd go. New Jersey for for honeymoon in April. I don't know.

So anyway, they go there and here they are. Married, a preacher and his wife and everything else. Five days later, they get home. Okay? She comes home with curtains for their house. Yeah.

And they're home now. They only were there a few days. And a chicken salad sandwich for him. That's nice. She came home with curtains and stopped and grabbed him lunch, too. Isn't that nice? Pretty good.

Yeah. Two hours later, he gets very sick. Uh-huh. Okay. Very nauseous, relentless vomiting. But chicken salad, I'd want to know where it came from. Yeah. It could be some bad mayonnaise in there, and that'll put you down.

Should you bring that home from Jersey? Yeah. So he's admitted to the Alamance County Hospital again. Yeah. Now, one of the things he says to his doctors, because they're like, would you ingest what's going on? He goes, I mean, I had a sandwich, but I don't think that was bad. He said, you know what, though? I've been using, because it's April, lately, I've been getting my lawn ready and my property ready for the summer, and I've been using a lot of chemicals in the lawn to kill weeds and shit.

I might have inhaled a bunch of it, basically. They don't even know that roundups toxic at this point. Fuck no. They're like, this is the best. Put it on your salad. You know, they're like, fucking go ahead. It's awesome. Spray it right on there, like a balsamic vinaigrette.

It's wild how much of that stuff was just out there. Oh, just everywhere. We don't know. Still in the ground. Still out there. We don't know what that did. Fuck no. No.

We find out in fucking 2045. Yeah. But let's blame cancer on other things. Not poison that we've been having put on us for a long time. We've just been walking around spraying in our feet for the last 30 years. Couldn't be that. Couldn't be that. Couldn't be.

Put it into a fine mist and spray in the air. It's real fine. So it can really get in your name. Or you could get to the end of the nozzle and spray it into a stream where it just bounces up to your face. That's what you really want. That's good. Put it in a pressurized jug that you just carry around. Yeah, there you go.

Christ. Wow. So they move him between the Alamance County Hospital and the North Carolina Baptist Hospital in Winston-Salem. Then to the North Carolina Memorial Hospital, which I don't like the word memorial in a hospital ever. I don't want anybody's, yeah. I'm still here. I don't want the. honor of somebody that died here?

Memorial means dead. Don't put that in the hospital name. I don't want that here. That sounds bad. How about life hospital? Living still alive. North Carolina is still alive hospital in Chapel Hill. Doing great. Carolina fixer hospital. Fixer.

Feeling good. Everything. Feeling good, Lewis Hospital. Maybe one of those. Where he deteriorates. He deteriorates now. Dwight. He told them. I've been working with a shitload of these herbicides killing my weeds. So, I mean, there's that. So he gets transferred back and forth and he keeps getting worse and nobody can figure out what the hell is wrong. Now, the big teaching hospital in Chapel Hill, North Carolina

Memorial Hospital, it's a big hospital. And they tend to go through things, especially these teaching hospitals because they're showing the kids how to go through everything, our young people aren't really kids. Then he gets worse. Damn. The doctors, he's got a bunch of doctors. He's got a bunch of doctors who are also working with the hospital's toxicologist, and they order a toxicology screen specifically to check for the poisons from the herbicides. See if that's what's overwhelming. Now, the test results come back, and this is fucking crazy. The doctor says that he has, quote, 20 times the lethal dose of arsenic in his system.

20 times the lethal dose. He said it's, quote, the most ever in a living patient in this hospital. Wow. Never seen a person with that much arsenic who's not dead. I want to give you some good news, bad news. I'm impressed. Yeah, you are.

Bad news. Strong. I'm not going to be impressed long. You're an ox. Let me tell you that. So this, he should have been dead, basically. They're like, I don't know how you're alive, but you have enough arsenic to kill a horse in your system. Literally.

You got enough to kill 20 of you. Yeah, 20 of you. But apparently he is a real strong guy. And he lost the full use of his hands and feet. And he was still suffering complications even after the, you know, everything. So from a hospital bed here, basically the hospital and the state bureau of investigation called the police. They interviewed Dwight from the hospital bed and he gave them the detail here. he mentioned, because they're just talking about his past and whatever.

And he said, well, yeah, my wife's ex-boyfriend died of that Gia, Beret, or whatever the fuck it is, syndrome. Died a bignettes. All the bignets killed him. That's what it was. That wasn't powder on top. That's the problem. It wasn't powdered sugar.

So they went, really? And they know that that looks a whole lot like arsenic poisoning and symptoms for that, the cops. So as soon as they heard that, then they basically, the cops said they looked at each other and smiled and were like, hold on now. Back this fucking train up. And they also learned that Blanche had tried to make herself the principal beneficiary of Dwight's pension as well.

Oh. And they were like, uh-oh. It's fucking crazy. Dwight said your body swells. You retain fluid. Your kidney shut down. Nausea turns you inside out. At least four times during the week that I was at my lowest, the doctors called my family to come to the hospital and told them I was dying.

Give this man his last rites and say goodbye. That is the craziest horrible. That sounds terrible. It sounds awful. Of a way to die. God, Jesus. That sounds horrible. It's months of pain and horror.

It's fucking bad. You explode internally. Yeah. It just eats you. Wow. And then they said, well, we'd like to do some hair. testing because hair is when you can if you get some hair you can tell exactly when they got is the way your hair grows at a steady pace they can tell exactly when you got doses of arsenic

it's like it's like it's in there yeah it's rings in a tree essentially they can really get it down and they said you know what why is your hair so short did you just what you cut your hair and she said well he said yeah that's because um my wife came to the hospital with her brother who's a barber and insisted that I get a haircut. What? So they can't. So they had to test his pubes. Oh.

She didn't think to shave his balls. She forgot that part. You get yourself haircuts down below? Never, sir. Perfect. Let's go. No, no. See if we can get some of the longest ones.

No, no. It's like getting Santa Claus in a leg lock down there, everybody. Bring in the tweezers. It's going to be crazy. It's all right. So the investigators, they, you know, they're talking to him. He's telling them of the other, of Reed's death. And because when they said, do you know anybody that Blanche has known who's died under unusual circumstances?

And he said, her ex-boyfriend there. And so the last time, this is funny, the Reverend Moore talks to Blanche when he's sick, he's still sick from arsenic. And they've already told him what's going on. And he said, what happened, Blanche? What's going on? And she said, quote, I'll tell my side at the right time. What? Which is not the answer you want out of your wife at that point.

That is not what I asked you, babe. Nope. So then in 1989, they get the back hose out. Oh. They get the bulldozers and the shovels out. Yeah. Because they're going to go a digging. Digging folks up.

We're going to dig a bunch of people up, by the way. This is... Wow. It gets way bigger. They have court orders and exhume the bodies of P.D. Kaiser, her father. Yeah. Dad. James Taylor, her first husband. Raymond Reed, the boyfriend, and Eila Taylor, the mother-in-law. What? They pulled her out, too?

You're pulling everybody out. They also pulled Joe Mitchell, a 57-year-old meat cutter at the same Kroger store where Blanche once worked. Wow. Anybody that's died in her orbit, we're pulling them all? They're also, they want to exhume Ina P. Vincent, a 74-year-old, whom Blanche visited with gifts of food during her final days of an illness in 1977. Holy shit. John W. Reber, a 77-year-old, who attended Dwight Moore's Church before Reber's death the year before, and Mabel Parsons, a 61-year-old.

cashier who died last year. Blanche just didn't like the looks of her. You know how it is with these Kroger cashier. So June 13th, 1989, here comes fucking Raymond Reed out of the Pine Hill Cemetery. Wow. He is

exhumed. The body's taken to the medical examiner's office here in Chapel Hill autopsy performed. They find, quote, clearly recognizable Meese lines, M-E-E-S lines across the fingernails of both hands and the toxicology report indicates a concentration of arsenic in reeds liver tissue 30 times higher than one might see in an average individual who's not having a significant exposure to arsenic.

Oh, boy. The arsenic in his brain tissue was approximately 67 times higher than that expected in a normal individual. Oh, boy. 67 times higher. Wow. As a result of these findings here, Dr. John D. Butts, B-U-T-T-S, buts. That's awesome. And Chief Medical, he's the Chief Medical Examiner, concluded that Reed, quote, died as a result of the complications of arsenic poisoning. Okay. Furthermore, he said, based on analysis of hair samples from the exhumed body of Reed, another doctor, a professor of chemistry at the University of, University of California, Irvine, and an expert in the field of nuclear chemistry concluded that the arsenic levels found in Reed's hair correspond to, as they can tell when it happened, a long period of ingestion of arsenic, multiple ingestions.

He's eaten, no, ingested a whole bunch of this one way over a long period of time. Oh, my God. He noted that the arsenic level peaked at 70 parts per million, which is roughly 70 times the normal. a level. Fuck. That is crazy. It should be, I guess, one part per million, I assume. So James Taylor, remember her, him?

Yeah. Old James Taylor, July 6th, 1989, he is exhumed. And the autopsy results are died of arsenic poisoning. How much? How much? Let's see. Let's see. Let's see.

Go through here. don't know exactly how much. But that's what it is. He's got a bunch of arsenic in his system here, which is fucking crazy. So they said the husband, the boyfriend, the father, and I believe the mother, the mother-in-law. The 83-year-old? All test positive for arsenic. The 83-year-old has art.

What the fuck could she have done wrong? Mother-in-law, man. You know. Told her. The seat in the back isn't near punishment enough. No, she just told her not. She didn't put the sweet shit on the sweet potatoes or whatever the fuck they eat down there. And that's, she lost her mind.

Imagine an 83 year old is the target of your ire. She shouldn't have talked shit about the green bean casserole. Jimmy, that's what happens. Cross me with one of my appetizers and see what happens. You're going down. Grandma. Holy fuck. What the fuck is happening?

That is dark. That's, yeah, I would say. James, on Thanksgiving Day. On Thanksgiving. Shit is dark, man. Wow. That's the most vicious thing I've ever heard in my life. She was doing that while the lion's lost.

Think about that. Yeah. That's what's going on. She's watching Landry stomp on his hat while she's sprinkling that over some fucking stuffing. What the fuck? This is crazy. My God. An 83-year-old on Thanksgiving Day is the most horrific thing I've ever heard. She was planning on killing his grandmother on Christmas, but couldn't get around to it.

You know what I mean? She's 102, so you never know. That's unbelievable. It's wild. Now, Lieutenant Steve Lynch, in addition probably to walking around annoying people with his guitar comic humor. Yeah. Is that who that is, Stephen Lynch? Yeah. Chief Detective of the Burlington Police. Everyone's going to say how much they love him. I get it. Okay.

He's very witty. He's very witty. That's why he needs musical accompaniment with him. Actually, for, I'll say this for him, for a guitar comic, he's as good as it gets. That is, yeah. Which is a compliment. He's as good as you can do with that. I can't stand if you just have a guitar.

I'm like, I want to hear your thoughts. I'm not listening. I'm not clapping along. I don't want to do that. but he's good at what he does. He put the F word in a song. Oh, my goodness. He changed that to the F word.

That was clever. But people love him. I get it. That's fine. But I love the Dan band a lot. Yeah. Oh, that's funny because that's a whole band. I love that guy.

I love all that. That's a whole band, though. They're committing. That's such commitment. That's such commitment. This is just one guy, a comic who's like, I can get people to clap along and it's easier to follow someone when I have a guitar. essentially because I'm different.

The other reason I love him is because he doesn't have to show us how fucking talented he is. He is married to Kathy and Jimmy who's so wealthy. He doesn't have to do a goddamn thing. But he runs out there showing us I'm talented too, motherfuckers. I could do something. And I love him. So this guy said that he, this is the most talked about criminal case in this town since 1939 when another local woman, Helen Holder, was charged. with harboring the two killers who had gunned down the police chief during a robbery of a gas station.

Sweet Christ. Yeah. Holder was convicted in this courthouse, the same one where Blanche is arraigned. He said, but nothing in memory has gotten the attention this case has. Not in Burlington. We've checked out the details in 22 deaths. Wow. We'll get to that.

He said, you can't just exhum bodies for everybody that calls in. Right, right. You can't just pull everybody out of the ground. I need a court order with a reason. for it. She killed an 83-year-old on Thanksgiving Day. Maybe on that. We don't know. Cold-hearted. Cold-hearted. So that's those lines, those clearly recognizable lines across the fingernails of Reed are really what they're white bands across the fingernails. That's a big deal. They said that and then the official thing that Dr. John Butts here said he reed died as a result of the complications of arsenic poisoning. It is amazing what your fingernails will tell you.

There's ways to tell if you have cancer, by the way your nails fit together. If you could see through it, you're fine. But if it's flat and there's no gap at the cuticle, you're in trouble. Is that real? That's real. Really? That's a real thing. I don't know.

I saw it on the internet. I feel like that's one of those. If your hands bigger than your face, you have cancer type of things, then you go. No, no. Is that a thing? No, no, no. It's a joke. As a kid.

People go, if your hands bigger than your face, you have cancer, and people go like that, and then you smack their hand in their face. You didn't go off in New York. We were mean to each other. Okay. But yeah, that's a thing that's a cancer fact. I can see you through here. You can see through it?

Al yeah. We're doing okay. I'm not dead yet, baby. I'm not dead yet. That's a thing, though. Is it? Wow. I don't know.

I know. Because your nails. You know, nurses and doctors, someone tell us. Things show up in your nails that, I mean, you should probably know the things. You can't just decipher it probably the average person, but they're, I'm sure, a nail tech. So really, you should, say you should stop going to your doctor and start going to see the Vietnamese ladies down at the nail shop. They'll tell you whether you're fine or not. Go get a manicure.

They'll tell you, oh, you got cancer. Yeah. They'll tell you you have cancer and you can go, oh, shit. and they can emotionlessly tell you you have cancer. And then they'll just keep... Very cold. Yeah. That's right.

You want gel or not? Yeah. Like doctors. I mean, they'll get the attitude of a doctor of like, well, you have cancer. I don't know what to tell you. There you go. Anything else? So, want a lollipop?

So the chemistry professor here, the doctor Vincent Gwynn, he's the guy who analyzed reads hair. And apparently it really locks in whatever's in your blood. So a strand of hair is like a time line. line. Yeah. It's pretty fucking interesting. And they said that it was a long period of ingestion of arsenic and multiple ingestion. So he could see no arsenic for a couple weeks here, a bunch of arsenic for a couple weeks here. You can look at it, which is wild. And he said the hair said again and again and again, arsenic, arsenic, arsenic, arsenic, yeah. This Dr. Gwyn, by the way, is the same nuclear

chemist who did the neutron activation analysis on the bullet fragments from the JFK. assassination in the 70s. I think it was for the Warren Commission possible. What did he figure out? He measured the bullets, the JFK bullets that came to Winston-Salem to measure. Yeah, he measured those. Okay, there you go. I don't know what he found.

Probably nothing, because they still don't know what that happened. He found some neutrons, James. Yeah, these are bullet fragments. And they went, yeah, we know. He's got a fucking hole in his head. And he goes, well, that's my, I'm a chemist. I don't know what to tell you. I think he died of gunshots.

That's my, I'm looking at these fragments and they don't look good. If they were in my skull, I'd say I was dead probably. These went through a body. That's my professional opinion. One of these exhumations is the co-worker Joseph Mitchell, the meat cutter there, who was 57. His body showed no elevated arsenic, and he died of natural causes. Damn. So he actually did die.

It was just right in the cluster of this time, so they had to check on it, basically. Now, one little lesson here on how arsenic works, because I don't know if every Everybody really, I don't know a ton about it. No, there's a reason they put skull and crossbones on that fucking rat poison. Poison is what I see. Oh, don't touch that. It's bad shit. So it's a naturally occurring element here.

Right. It's been around, people have used this to murder people for thousands of years. Yeah. I mean, this is. This is biblical shit. Yeah. Oh, yeah. The Romans, well before Shakespeare.

The Romans, this is how they would kill each other. I mean, you want to knock off. And that. Yeah. You want to knock off your uncle who's. the emperor so you can be the emperor. This is how you do it. And arsenic's just in the environment, right? It's in water and stuff like that. It's a naturally occurring substance. Absolutely. They call it inheritance powder, which I think is, ha!

They've called it that since like the, you know, 1,200s. That's amazing. Some comic in the 1200s put that, 1200s put that on like his stone Instagram page. He hammered that into a tablet. Put it up against the wall and he's like, as people went by, they were like, they just gave thumbs up. He picked that up off a bar stool on a stone and read, inheritance powder. Then somebody picked up a stone and started chiseling and he's like, what do you do? And he's like, I want to share this. It's like, oh, that's how you had to share back then.

It was very difficult. I'm making a greeting card. I'm sharing. That's, yeah. So it's a powder. You can make it into tasteless, odorless, white powder. You'd never know it's there. That's what's fucking crazy.

The most frightening substance on the planet is what it's terrifying. Yeah. You can just put it in food and drink and no one will ever fucking know about it, especially if it's something that tastes strong. You never think of that. Yeah. Now, the one way you can do it is one massive single dose. You can kill somebody very easy with a big dose.

Yeah. But the problem is any doctor who takes one look at the corpse knows exactly what happened. Okay. That's the issue with that. If a healthy person just eats something, then keels over, you know. Secrets out. It's getting investigated. Yeah.

But the second way is to low dose poisoning over weeks and months, which makes it look like someone is chronically ill. Gradually getting sick. Gradually getting sicker. And it mimics shitloads of very common things. As we saw, that's why we keep getting misdiagnosed. Yeah. So it looks like the flu, like a stomach bug, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea weakness. Then it starts to attack the nervous system, numbness and tingling in the hands and feet.

Doesn't that sound just like the other syndrome? Yeah. That's the problem. Then it hits the skin. Rashes swelling. Eventually you can swell so much the skin can split. That's insane. That is disgusting.

Holy shit. It fucks the kidneys up, the marrow in the blood, shuts down your systems one at a time. And basically in the 60s, 70s and 80s, if someone wasn't thinking there's a probability this person's being poisoned, they're not going to look for that. They're just going to take normal medical things,

gastroenteritis, shingles even, heart failure. Because they thought Dwight had shingles when he first went to the hospital. They thought, oh, yeah, you got a few flu-like symptoms from shingles. That's what they thought it was. Then he got worse. It essentially just sits on the side of your house and flips each little breaker until they're all off. Living room. You don't need in your plodry room and the outlets and the kitchen and GFI units.

GFI units there. Not going to need that dryer. Yeah. Goodbye. That's all it is. Wow. And the bands go across the fingernails, and there's also the hair, and that's the one that really locks in the toxins here. So, yeah, and like I said, with the hair, they don't just say there was arsenic.

They can basically tell you the specific dates when there was arsenic. Yeah. Looking it over. I mean, they can kind of figure it out and get within about a week of when the fuck this happened. Yeah, because a hair only grows like a quarter of an inch a week. So if you've got two inches of hair, you've got so much time. There's a whole, it's like a stock ticker back in the day that coming out of thinking, oh, it was higher yesterday. I mean, it's, yeah.

Wow, oh, no, I'm losing money. So then they had to trace the poison. Where'd she get this poison? The problem is, this isn't a controlled substance. This isn't something you have to sign for. You can go into any hardware store and buy poison. It's at Kroger's. It's at Kroger's.

It's everywhere. You can go anywhere you want. Now, the specific arsenic that they got here that she ended up. getting was anti-ant, A-N-T-I-A-N-T. Ant-Killer. Or, in her case, kill your aunt. People kill her. Maybe. People kill her.

Yeah. It was manufactured by a company called Atla Chemical Company in McLeansville, North Carolina. Little company, they just make poison. Oof. Now, the owner of this company, Peggy Vaughn, said that her company had made anti-aunt for over a decade and that arsenic is the main active ingredient. You know, poison. and that the states exhibit later on they showed us,

is this what you sell? And she said, that's the same shit. That's what I sell. Looks just like it. So also a Kroger coworker named Brenda Green remembered Blanche recommending anti-ant to a customer as good stuff works well. It crushes as an ant killer. And then Dwight also said her husband, Dwight Moore,

said in the summer of 85, Blanche showed him a bottle of anti-ant and asked him to buy more from Bird's Food Center, which he did and gave it to her. So he might have bought his own poison, by the way. That's fucked up. That is, she's too fucking lazy to even get her own poison for these people. Can you run down the store and get my murder weapon? Wow. Can you imagine being like, can you have me that gun there?

Thank you. And then shooting the guy. Fucking, hey, get it yourself next time. Toss me those 38 rounds. Yeah. Jesus Christ. And a former coworker named Leonard Wolfe, who ran. who ran a little convenience store

called Ken's Quickey Mart remembers Blanche coming in and around April 89, which is when they got married and when he got sick in early April 89, right before the wedding, right before the poisoning

and asked if he had any anti-aunt in stock. Wow. Is that liquid or a powder? Powder. It's a powder? Yeah. Granules. Jesus.

Fucking granules. Yeah. You lay it down. They take it into their nest and die. Wow. So, gross. So after all this, they have to sit down and have a little chit-chat with Blanche. Yeah.

We got to have a little talk with old Blanchie girl here. What have you done? They sit her down. Yeah, what have you done? And she comes in and like a dress and a blouse and little big glasses with the chain and gray hair. Oh, she's drawn an ascot. Absolutely. She's almost 60 years old and dresses like she's 76.

So she comes in and she sits down. She denies everything. I don't know what you're talking about. Yeah. They ask about arsenic, and she said they probably took it themselves. Everybody you know? They keep taking it, these guys. I'm such a pain in the ass.

Every man I'm with tries to murder himself with arsenic. That's how it works. I'll drink ant poison. Yeah. And they were like, well, I mean, let's forget about your alive husband. Let's talk about your two dead husbands. 15 years apart, they both had the same idea. Right.

To just spread, you know, rather than sweet and low in their coffee, they're going to use fucking arsenic today. That's it. Throw that in your fucking summertime lemonade? Yeah, that's what's going on here. And then they said, what about the hair? You knew that they checked hair and you had his haircut. Right. We had to use pubes, man.

What the fuck, basically. You got us digging around in a man's crotch. In an old man, in an old dying man's crotch. You scumbag. So here are some Xer. from the interrogation, which is great that we have this. The cop said when he, meaning Raymond Reed, started getting real sick when he was at the hospital, did you ever carry him food or anything?

Did you take food in? She says, no, you couldn't carry him in food, which he knows a lie. It's true. They said, you never carried Raymond, no, you never carried Raymond no food while he was in the hospital. Oh, boy. This is a homicide detective. She said... The man went to school for this.

Yeah, this is an important man in the community. Yeah, you never carried Raymond, no food. She said, no, sir. I didn't. I don't remember taking anything into his room. Okay. Which is very specific into his room, sounds... Why are you qualifying it with that?

They said, did Raymond ever give you any money? Yeah. She said, well, as a matter of fact, yes, he did. Raymond did give you money. Did give me money. They said, did he give you a large amount of money? She said, when he was in Colorado, he wrote me or called me or something. I can look it up.

He said he felt so guilty that he was on vacation and I was not. So he sent me a check for $1,000. In Colorado. When he was in Colorado, he felt so guilty, gave her a check for $1,000. They said, what was that the most he ever, was that the most he ever gave you? and she said, to my knowledge, but now Raymond, he was always giving me something, buying me expensive gifts. It's a real giver. This Kroger manager gig is crushing, man.

Yeah. Wow. Oh, you don't, you don't, grocery store managers make a killing. Apparently so. They really do. He's doing great down there. He's the highest paid person in the store, and they move them to other ones based on how well their store performance. I never knew if they made a lot of money or whatever.

I mean, they seem to do okay, but, I mean, he's buying expensive gifts, having a wife and her on the side. buying her shit. That's, you know, you have a fair money? That's a... Early 2000 was six figures. Mm. They're doing great.

That's great then, yeah. I don't know if you had a fair money, but I guess you did. I don't know. Is six figures a fair money? I don't think it is. In the 80s? In the 80s, six figures

of the fair money. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know if they were making that. They're probably making $80 grand a year in the 80s. That's a lot of money in the year. If they're making six figures in the early 2000, they've got to be, right? Six figures in the early 2000s, that's a lot of fucking money. It's a lot of money.

I mean, when I say $6.50, $130, 140? Yeah, that's a fair money in 2002, for sure. Probably, yeah. Yeah, yeah. That's if they split this and half, who gives the shit? I'm still making $70,000. I can still afford it. It's like my math joke.

I can get that one bedroom. I can do it. Yeah, I still, oh, fuck yeah. So then the cop said, well, it's obvious that he must have really loved you. I tried and bade her a little. She said, well, I think he did. And another thing that I have to honestly say about this with this thing with Dwight, was that he knew, knew that Dwight,

he says Raymond knew about Dwight. Oh. That's what she says. So she wasn't really having an affair. It's not an affair. It's an open relationship. It's just fine. Yeah, they're just freaky church people.

It's all good. They said, we cannot ignore the fact that you got a husband here with arsenic in him. If Raymond Reed had got it in him, you're the only connection between the two. She said, what do you mean the only connection when I, I, I, I, I, went all that span of time and did not see Raymond before he got sick. And they said, you know, Blanche, you visiting him the whole time in the hospital, the whole time he was there. And she said, when Raymond was in the hospital, he had one nurse with him all the time. You went in for five minutes, meaning you don't know what was going on.

Ask the nurse, basically. So they go, tell you what, turn around. Let's test and see how small these cuffs go. Yeah. With your little bony wrists. You're under arrest. So she's arrested, charged with first-degree murder in the deaths of James Taylor and Raymond Reed with an assault with an assault with a deadly weapon with the intent to kill for the poisoning of Dwight Moore.

Okay. Oh, because he survived. Yeah. They're going to deal with the rest of it if they have to later. And just these are the ones they can prove pretty definitively and those are the ones they're going for. And so, yeah, she's held in the county jail for 14 months before trial. Whoa. Just knitting.

Yeah. Making pudding. Dwight Moore said that if he had died, Blanche might have inherited as much as $75,000. Okay. But this is the night. He's such a nice man, this guy. He said he didn't believe that was her reason for poisoning him, though,

was for money. The fuck else? In his mind, he's like, who would do that? Oh, she didn't do it for money. She's a cold-hearted bitch. Yeah. She's nasty. Listen to this.

He said, quote, I think her motive was her inability to actually express her dissatisfaction with folks. And it was easier for her to do this than to say no. Very non-confrontational. Yeah. He's basically saying that's exactly what it is. Rather than break up with someone, it's just easier to kill them to not have the confrontation. She okay? I don't know.

No, he's had a lot of arsenic and poison it. This arsenic has fucked his brain up. Yeah, but actually also, psychologically, that might be... Is it easier to do it, to live with it like that? I mean, she had to run away from her dad, so maybe that's her thing. Get away from the person. You can't get away from a person you're married to unless you kill them. You know?

I mean, he may have to rectify it with those words because otherwise he laid next to a murderer every goddamn night. Yeah, and for money, too. This makes her like... This is a really generous view of things that she just had a quote, to an inability to actually express her dissatisfaction with folks. With folks. That's the most generous thing ever of. She got people to sign over their will shit and then killed them. That seems more to the point.

Down homesy. Yeah. Yeah, this is almost folksy the way it's this way. It's almost a folksy murder. So the. Disatisfaction with folks. I mean, how nice does he sound? You could burn his house down.

He goes, well, I think he was just testing the veracity of a zippo, really. I mean, he wanted to make sure it was a fine piece of equipment he had, and it was an operational. I think he just wanted to see if the two-by-fours would stand up. You know what? I can understand the curiosity. He's a real kind man. Now, the locals freak out about this shit. Yeah.

And it's funny because it's not our normal freak-out way. The normal freak out way is they buy door locks and guns and alarms and, you know, lose their fucking minds and don't want their kids to go outside. Auntie's not invited to Thanksgiving anymore. This is almost like funny because they're like, well, she can't hurt me. She's an old lady in jail. So it's like, you know, no one's going to break in my house. You had to be married to her. So people are almost like, it's almost like it's like a, not a joke because they know that, you know, these poor guys died.

It's very serious. Yeah. It's very serious. But it's also like this fucking nice old lady. killed people. This is nuts, right? For almost no gain. That's what's crazy. She really didn't get much.

So Rick Wolf, a clerk at the convenience store near the church that Moore was a pastor at, remembers her coming in a few weeks before her husband's illness. And this is a different clerk, by the way, than the one they talked to before. He said, quote, she wanted ante aunt. I told her we didn't have any. She said to get some and that it's good stuff. Try it in banana pudding, especially. It's really excellent.

It really goes great in potato soup. Yeah. And this guy's even dumber than anybody else. This guy says, quite honestly, I doubt that it meant anything. No, it does. That's the... Oh, boy. I mean, I know she was looking for the poison that she used to kill a bunch of people with,

but I don't think that she was looking... I think she just really had ants in that visit. You should get it. It's real fucking words. Good stuff. I don't think she meant anything by it. I think she meant it fucking works. I would think, yeah, it kills shit.

Whatever you put it on. He said, quite honestly, I doubt that it meant anything. I like Blanche, but after everything that's come out, it does make you have some questions. All the questions. Some questions. She killed two husbands and her 20-year affair and possibly her mother-in-law. Oh, and her father as well. Every man that's been around her lived in a house.

with her is dead or dying of arsenic poisoning. It does lead you to at least two questions. One is how many and the other is fucking why? Why? Two great questions. And how stupid am I that didn't put those things together? Is the other thing.

How dumb am I? Why don't I know? Why don't I think about things better? Another, the manager of the Burlington of a Burlington Grill said everybody's talking about it. A lot thinks she did it. A lot think somebody tried to frame her. Whoa.

Wow. People that know her say she'd never do a thing like that. Concerning her father, they just can't believe it. Okay. Wow. Then the victim's relatives come in. They're a bit disturbed, and they're even more disturbed by the fact that people are, don't think that she did it, even though it's pretty obvious she did.

I mean, I mean, you're fucking break here. Yeah. Curtis Parsons, who is the brother of Mabel Parsons, who died in October. October of what he thought was lung cancer. That's a lady that Blanche had visited in the hospital a few days before her death and brought her fucking food. Wow. He said it was a complete surprise to me when police called me about my sister's death. It's very difficult to go through the death of someone you love and then to have this crop up.

Either Blanche Moore was the sweetest woman who ever lived or she's a killer. Or the fucking devil. No in between. There really isn't. She's either, yep. He said, and now there's every, and now there's talk about. exhuming more bodies. Well, we'd just like to see the whole thing laid to rest. Well, the only way is to do this.

You're not the, it's a district attorney, thankfully. Yeah, you're the prosecutor's office. We need to see how many people is brought killed. That's what we need to see. I mean, I get that you don't want to pop it up and your sister's dead either way, so fuck it. But I'd want to know if my sister was murdered or died of natural causes for Christ's sake. I mean, hopefully at the end, in the interrogation where we have or in court or, whatever, when we have definitive evidence to really give her the what for and make sure that she recognizes what she's done, maybe she'll just be like, all right, here's all of them.

All right, fine. But in the event that she fucking doesn't, get out to John Deere. Let's go to this. Yeah. Let's break out the fucking the shovels, boys. So she's in jail, awaiting trial, and a letter arrives to police. Oh. It is a letter signed by a.

man named Garvin Thomas who was a local man. He's a guy who exists. In it, and this is the member of the person said maybe someone, she said she's trying, someone was framing her. Well, in it, Garvin Thomas confesses to murdering

Raymond Reed and to attempting to murder Dwight Moore. He said that he did it because, why, Jimmy? I'm in love with her. I'm in love with Blanche. Oh, boy. Couldn't help myself. Yeah. You're seeing into her psyche now even deeper, right?

Yeah, yeah. So that's who it is. So police go and find Garvin Thomas, who's a real man who exists. And then they also get handwriting people. And the handwriting said here that it's not Garvin Thomas's handwriting. As a matter of fact, sure looks a lot like Blanche's, is what the experts said. Why did she do that? She wrote her own confession letter saying that someone's in love with her.

because then it makes her look innocent and sexy at the same time. It's everything a narcissist needs. And used a real man, a real person to threw him under the bus. It's crazy. So, yeah, he turns up and the defense would love to him to be a real guy that really did this. But the problem is he actually has gone to see her. That's the issue. There's testimony from a jailer, Carolyn Hinshaw, that a man carrying.

a teddy bear and signing in as Garvin Thomas had tried to visit Blanche in jail, saying he'd done so much wrong in his life and hurt so many people that he wanted to start writing his wrongs. That's what this person said. Now, we don't know if this actually was Garvin Thomas, though. Yeah. Could have somebody acting like him. So the defense person here, the defense attorney said, they said that, oh, I'm sorry, no, the person, yeah, okay, said that when when her boss heard about the teddy bear visitor,

they arranged a meeting with Garvin Thomas, at which he reportedly said he knew he was going to die, and he knew Blanche hadn't done the things she was accused of, and that he'd hurt her and her family, and he was sorry. So that's what the defense said, the lawyer said, and by the time trial comes up, of course, he's dying in death. So anyway, that's the thing. Was there a guilt-wracked secret admirer, you?

you know, trying to write his wrongs carrying fucking teddy bears or what? The prosecution says she wrote the letter herself. That's what happened. We're not, you know, get the fuck out of here. But even her own defense expert said that he saw signs that there was disguising in the writing, but wouldn't swear that Garvin Thomas wrote it. So even her expert says, I don't think it's Blanche, but I can't say it's him. Okay.

So that's not great for her. The problem is, too, when they're really looking into her, there's the obvious people to dig up and look at. But then there's a list of about 22 dead acquaintances connected to Blanche over the years. And they get court orders to pull medical records on all of them. A huge list. 22. That's a lot of people in your circle. Wow.

Yeah, that's a shitload. So they were looking into that. Now, one of the things, she's known as the Black Widow Killer. Yeah. And we've, you know, encountered a few of these in time. And just to give you a kind of an overview of how common it is or uncommon or whatever here, basically, these are, unless you only do it once, these are, these are serial murders is what these are. And basically, serial killing is, that's a male thing. It's a dude thing for the most part.

It's basically about seven to one male to female. Jesus. Serial killers. Yeah. That's heavy. Yeah, women kill people who are close to them. They don't kill random people. They don't get satisfaction out of that.

It's not the same thing. Children, husband, whatever. Yeah, they kill people they're close to. So, and also men are, they'll stalk and do all this shit and women don't do that. Most of the time, sexual element, that's so fucking gross. Even if it's not a sexual element to attack them, this is giving them some kind of sexual satisfaction. The sexual element involved in this, and he might come in his pants killing. Exactly, like BTK.

Yeah. So, yeah, women, though, they kill people. They know, they know. And for hundreds of years, poison has been their main murder weapon. Because a lot of times they're dealing with someone who's physically stronger than them, bigger than them, things like that. So, and they're trusted to make meals also. So that's what you end up with. And it doesn't require a struggle.

It doesn't do anything. So the Black Widow one is a woman who systematically murders, partners, partners. and spouses and family members over a long period, usually for profit, insurance, estates, and poison is a big way they do that. And they say that's the opposite of men, too. Women don't do this when they're 20, 25, 27. They do it later, whereas by the time they start with that, men are kind of burned out on serial killing. It's rare for serial killers to be killing people into their 50s. That's rare.

Rex Hewerman was a fucking, it was different. And he's huge so he can dominate anybody. Exactly. And he's a giant fucking guy. As you age, you get more docile because... They tend to burn out on it. Yeah, yeah. You just don't have the energy.

They might go out once in a while, but also as they age, they have more responsibilities. They're more tired. They have to fucking work all day. Yeah. I don't think I can strangle anybody with my fucking arthritis. A carpal tunnel. You know, it's not good.

My strangling thumbs all fucked up. I can't get it. You're going to survive. I'm sorry. Shit, I'm sorry. This hurts too much. This is going to go on for a while. can't get a good grip. Let me tell you. This literally hurts me more than it hurts you.

It really, really does. So, yeah, that's how it works. Now, pre-trial opinions here. This is Lloyd Taylor. This is James Taylor's son. Brother. Brother. A fucking victim's brother said, quote, everything points one way, but I just don't know. That's how much she comes across as meek church lady. Yeah. Nice little little church lady. All the evidence is there and he says, I still just don't. I can't see it out of her.

And that's why a lot of them get away with it for so long if they're doing a lot of it. Yeah. He says she was one of the most congenial persons you've ever seen. Always smiling. The only thing I can say, I hope she gets justice, whatever that is. I don't know if she did it. Oh, boy. Now the sister said it seems kind of odd.

All the rest of us lived to be a ripe old age. James was very young. We had a premonition something wasn't ripe, but we couldn't put our fingers on it. It's just really tore me up wondering why. We bury them one time. They dig them up, and then we bury them again. It's horrible.

I just don't understand. Yeah, that's awful. That's awful. And they said the motive seems to be the part that people kind of get fucked up on because Blanche's defenders, like even some of these people's relatives, say there's no.

motive. She's just what she appears to be. Her brother, Sam, here, said he believed, he said, as God is my witness, I do not see a dark side to my sister, nor have I seen a dark side. And he said she believed that the guy who she said wrote the letters, he's the actual killer. That's what he believes. It's unbelievable. It's absolutely unbelievable. He went out to say she was more willing to give to people, give to people than to receive from people. She didn't give arsenic. Yeah, that's a problem. She didn't believe in making her good deeds known. She was just a caring person. Wow. Okay. Now, her sister said, one thing is certain behind the headlines is a person who is not capable of doing this. And here's a co-worker. This is what I love. At work, somebody hates you.

Guaranteed, especially if you're head anything, somebody hates your ass. No matter what, where you're at, unless you are, and even then, people hate you. And no matter where you are. Hate you. Somebody despises you. They will at least talk some shit if you're going. Now, Kroger had given her top ratings at her job and called her a good leader in reports and used her to train cashiers. But one of her coworkers said, if you got on her bad side, she could be vindictive.

everyone thought she was two-faced. She could be very underhanded. That's what a murderer is. That's the real deal right there. That's the person that saw it. Ask the broad work in the checkout counter next to her if she's cool or not. You'll find out fast.

That's it. Now, the Reverend Moore, wow. He said that, quote, she seemed to be a Christian woman that would make a good mate for a minister. That's why I married her. Seemed like a nice Christian woman. He says that, you know, he says he still feels numb.

He says he knows she gave it to him because she had to have. There's no one else that could have done it. He says, quote, I'm not harboring any bitterness. He's the nicest man who's ever lived. He's just a nice time man. Did he recover fully? I can't be. Something's got to be in his brain.

This is horrible. I'm the poor guy, but I think he's just a nice guy. I think he's like, he like read the Jesus stuff and went, oh, yeah, do the stuff that Jesus said to do. Yeah, that's what you did. I think he read that part. It's wild. He said, I don't have any need for vengeance. I'm trying to concentrate my energies on recovering, not being consumed by hate. Well, you almost didn't. Wow. You almost didn't. Now, her attorney says, quote, she's been anxious about all the negative little things that have come out in the whole 14 and a half months. She's had a desire to respond and has had no forum.

Thank fuck, because otherwise she's going to end up like Corey Richens having all of her fucking text going, they're going to pay for what they did to me, that judge, and how dare he, and make it worse for herself. This is it better. Speaking in Carney with her mouth. Yeah, like McKenzie there. So the lawyer also said the defense will show that she was a kindly woman who loved the men in her life and suggested the victims ingested arsenic in other ways. Just happen to keep ingesting it. he said, we'll be suggesting possible alternatives.

There's so much to be said, and I want to get on saying it. Well, that's the thing about our system is that you may want a forum, but that's maybe the worst thing for you. You wait until your day in court. That's it. You're going to get on the fucking news and chert. Never going to look good. Ask Chris Watts how that worked out.

Real well. And I'm asking you, and don't write a book about it either. Yeah. It's the other thing. So this case is bringing up a lot. lot of comparisons to a 1984 case where a woman named Velma Barfield

was executed after killing four people with rat poison. She's executed. She was known as death row granny. Jesus. Okay. That's so fucked up. It's fucking dark, right? Yeah, I don't like that at all.

It sounds like a woman who comes into death row with cookies and doilies every couple days to keep their spirits up. Yeah. Hello, boys. Draws another notch on the wall. I don't care. what they did. They're nice boys to me now. That's all I care about. Lord.

October 1990, Raymond Reed murder trial. Okay. Now, the thing is, Blanche lived in Alamance County. Reed was poisoned in Alamance County, but there was other shit. He technically died at the North Carolina Baptist Hospital, which is in Forcith County. So there's a venue struggle here there. And it was poisoned at the Forceth one, right? In that hospital at the end there. and that's where he died. So that's where she's going to have to stand trial here.

Right. So they take everybody from there, the judge and everything else, and bring them over to that county. And they said there was suffocating publicity back there, but of course there was. It's everywhere. They tried to get it changed. The defense tried to get it changed, not to force it, but to somewhere far away where her name isn't known as the poisoning granny. You know what I mean? This is shocking that she's going to try to fight this.

shocking. Well, they did a study. The investigator survey found that 49 out of 50 people polled had followed her case. And that one guy. 36 had formed an opinion and 31 of those opinions were she's guilty. So that's a tough one for a jury there. 62% think you're a fucking asshole. They think you're a dick. Two of them said that she was guilty and that they should quote, fry the woman. That was on their thing. And there was even a radio station in Ashborough, WKRR FM, that kept playing a song calling Blanche a Black Widow Spider. Wow. So, of the 33 news articles, the defense submitted as proof of prejudice, the court noted at least three contained exculpatory material, as far as possible other people. And only one was truly inflammatory. And that was a piece in a magazine called True Police Cases, which that's going to be bullshit.

it. And the headline was, quote, the men in her life keep dropping like flies. He said the rest were just factual accounts. All right. So they said that's all the same shit the jurors are going to hear. And every one of the 12 jurors seated swore they had formed no opinion and could decide on evidence alone. Out of 110 prospective jurors screened, 46 were dismissed for already deciding she was guilty. Not good. They came to the interviews with a port.

torch and a pitch for her. Yeah, they just showed up, well, we're here. Go on let her out in the street. We'll take care of it. Should I like this now? Should I wait till we find her guilty or what? Good Christ. There is also a disadvantage to her here in this county as well.

When the case was in Alamance County, the DA had agreed to an open file policy, which is if the defense gets to see everything, not just. the things they have to see legally for discovery. Then the case moved to Forcith, and that guy said, I'm not doing that. That's what that guy told you. I mean, what I'm doing. I'll give you what I have to give you legally and not a shred fucking more. You can eat shit.

So the defense said what the fuck, and they tried to go to a separate hearing for that. And the court said, no, no, what you want to do here. That's it. So this is another thing. Now, during all of this, while she was in jail, Reid, Raymond Reed's ex-wife and two sons sued North Carolina Baptist

Hospital for malpractice over the lost 86 arsenic test. Because if they had given that to the doctor, they would have known he was being poisoned and she would have been a suspect and would have stopped and he would have lived, essentially. So it's like Dexter over here, like the member of Dexter with the father.

They said normally a wrongful death claim would be time barred, but the family got the statute of limitations thrown out by proving that Blanche, who was an executor of Reed's estate, was the person legally entitled to learn about the toxicology screen and that she fraudulently concealed it because they didn't know it got lost. They thought they must have given it to her and she threw it out. But then it comes out through everything in the discovery that it got lost at the hospital, which was even fucking worse. There's a longstanding rule in American courts that basically while the defendant is hiding the wrongdoing, you can't, that the statute of limitations can't run out.

restarts again if they're doing that. That's how we keep it going. Because otherwise, they could just hide everything until the statute ran out and then they were fine. So now in the civil case, the Fifth Amendment protections that shield a criminal defendant aren't there anymore. It's not the same a civil case. You don't have rights, you don't have constitutional rights in a civil case. That's why OJ had to do those depositions and testify and all that shit in the civil case because you had no choice. So under a deal between the force of the DA and the Reed family's lawyers, much of the evidence against Blanche was gathered by the family's civil attorneys based on this lawsuit.

So they had all that shit, all sorts of stuff. The defense said, okay, basically they said, we want a bill of particulars. Basically, they said, you say she poisoned him, then tell us exactly when she poisoned him. Give us exact times and dates and locations of where the poison went into the body. Do that. The prosecution said numerous and for months. We don't have to give you exact fucking time and date from her in him over this long. Okay.

You know what I mean? So they were going to try and prove she was elsewhere so she couldn't have done it. But how many times it is in a strand of hair, we can't. Yeah, exactly. We just know that he's poisoned and she's the only one close to him. That's exactly right. But she's wanting, she thinks that would be reasonable doubt if they don't know exactly. when and maybe she wasn't there.

Okay. But there's no moment to pinpoint. It's the whole goddamn, almost a year that went on here. So the basically prosecution's cases Blanche fed Reed in the hospital. Every time she fed him, he kept getting worse. And she's denying that she even brought him food at all despite every witness in the hospital saying all he ate was her food. There's also Rule 404B thing here, which is the judge let the state tell me. the jury about the other poisonings.

It's prior bad acts. That's normally, that's the 404B deal. Under North Carolina's Rule 404B, you generally can't drag in someone's prior bad acts to argue that they're a bad person, so they must have done this. But if those acts show motive, opportunity, intent, plan, knowledge,

or identify a signature, then you can do that. So the court found Blanche's pattern was a signature, therefore it's allowed in. Okay. So now they can talk about the others. They can bring Dwight on the stand saying she was poisoning me while I was alive. When it's an M.O.

When it's an M.O. Exactly. And in each case, financial motive and all of that. And also they said knowledge and access to ante ant. Arsonic delivered in multiple doses over a long stretch, not one big hit. She did it the same every time also shows her patterns. That's it. In each case, she was said to have, but heard someone heard her say she hated the victim. or that the victim was evil or cruel. Right. And in both cases, she already had another guy lined up. So, okay. Now, the judge said he kept out these specific arsenic levels found in James Taylor's, found in Moore's body. But the death of James Taylor and that was in her own father.

I'm sorry. They left out PD Kaiser's arsenic levels. Oh. But James Taylor and Dwight Moore, all of that comes in. Sure. Okay. prosecution opening here. He said, I know she looks nice and she looks like everybody's grandmother,

but I accept that that's the challenge of the prosecution to overcome that. He said, this isn't ordinary. This is extraordinary. The mathematics of it are powerful and I believe in them. In other words, you've got to believe the science here. And he also quoted the song Secret Agent Man by saying, A pretty face can hide an evil mind. Secret.

Asian man? What is that? That song's ruined now. It was Tom Jones or something. Yeah, it was in a comedy, though. Oh, it was in a million comedy. He's Austin Powers. It was all over that.

Yeah. When I was a kid, I always thought it was Asian. A secret Asian man? I didn't know why. I was like, why is he hiding that he's Asian? It was so, I didn't know what it meant. I was just like, whatever. I don't know.

Some guy doesn't want everybody to know he's Asian or something. That's what I thought the song meant. I had no fucking idea because I was a dummy. It seems pretty obvious, guys. Why is everybody? Yeah. What are we kidding me here? Why is everybody so snowed around here?

How is this a secret? I don't get it. It's a bad secret. Yeah. So there's Nurse Wanda Moss. She's a very damaging witness here. She described Reed being fed through a narrow Dobhoff tube that clogged easily and how the nurses cleared it by syringing Coca-Cola through it. Oh, Jesus.

Like a truck engine to get the shit off. The Coke sat unattended in the room and the syringes were in an unlocked closet right next to the. Right next to the Coke. She may have done it with that? I'm just going to put it right in his feeding tube. Good Lord. Blanche was frequently present for all of it. Also, they said that they said, what did you see or bring from home?

Peanut butter milkshakes, banana pudding, tomato pudding. The fuck is that. I don't even know how you do that. That sounds like ketchup. Yeah, right. That's tomato pudding. That goes on hot dogs. That is okay.

Wow. Now, cornbread, milk, and also notes showed that he was repeatedly complaining of nausea in the day after he was fed. He was fed by Blanche. A bunch of soft shit that dissolves powder very easily. That's what he had. Yep. Yep. And could be put in a tube.

Yeah. Also, this nurse said she never saw anyone but Blanche bring him food or feed him. Uh-oh. As well. Lisa Hutchins, the lead ICU nurse, said that on October 1st when he was feeling good, she saw Blanche feeding him banana pudding and that two days later he was begging her to not let him die. Oh my God. Stephen Reed, the son, talked about my father's skin splitting.

Oh, shit. In 24 hours after eating a breakfast that Blanche prepared for him. That's crazy. The treating physicians walked the jury through months of multiple system failures and misdiagnosis and everything else. Each one of them in hindsight saying now it's obvious, it's arsenic. That's what's doing this. Being poisoned. Yeah.

John Butts is in there, Dr. Butts, and they bring it in. They talk about the 30 to 67 times the normal tissue levels and all that kind of shit. The anti-aunt lady testifies saying, and other people testify saying they heard her recommend it to people at various times. And the storekeeper who asked for it the week that he was killed. There's a handwriting expert who told the jury. that Garvin Thomas's confession was written by Blanche. Then they bring up the old good Reverend Dwight Moore up on the stand and sit him down. And the lead prosecutor, Janet Branch, she'll be Janet Downing later.

Keep him remember that because I got a crazy story about her when this is done. She's doing the questioning. A few questions in, for some reason Janet Branch became overwhelmed and burst into tears. Oh. and then after about 30 seconds she just stood up and fled the courtroom. Who was she? The prosecutor.

She just started crying out of nowhere? At a nowhere while questioning her own witness. And the defense moved for a mistrial saying this display of emotion tainted the jury and the judge just took a recess and pulled the jurors on whether the prosecutor's exit would affect their impartiality. And they said, no, we don't know what she's got going on.

Maybe you're not the fuck that is. She broke up with her boyfriend yesterday. I don't fucking know. Yeah, we don't know what's going on. And they went, all right, case continues. So her defense led by attorneys here had, it's tough. They get a handwriting expert who kind of muddies the waters, but even he wouldn't say it was definitely Garvin Thomas that wrote the letter.

The teddy bear visitor testimony they put on. They put on the will attorney who described Blanche basically steering the will toward herself, which turned out to be not a great witness for them. Then Blanche testifies. Hell yeah. Her best course of action is look at me and listen to me talk. I couldn't do this. Even these victims' families believe at some of them.

So. Right. Why not? So she dressed up. And I mean, she is in a blue suit with a white blouse, pearls, the big glasses, holding a tissue. Fast ask on. Yeah. Acting much older than she is.

Oh, boy. And she denied everything, all the physical stuff. She said that while Reed was in the ICU, she only recalled him being fed by a tube. She denied ever seeing him have any food at all in that period. She denied bringing him banana pudding or peanut butter milkshakes, even though they had a shitload of people saying the opposite. What the fuck? People said, swore that they watched her spoon feed him, not just giving him a shake. And she says no.

Yep. She denied having anything to do with Reed's will, even while admitting that he had given her power of attorney. And even though the goddamn lawyers who did the whole thing testified and so did the nurses, it's crazy. She admitted she'd heard of Auntie Ant, but never bought it, never tried to buy it and never recommended it to anyone, even though several people say the opposite. She never said good stuff, Maynard? Never, never, yep. And then she flatly denied poisoning everybody. So she just went against all the evidence and said no.

Nah, nah. Nah. In closing, the prosecutor said that he only needs to prove a reasonable explanation for a man dying of repeated arsenic doses, fed by a hand in the hospital by one specific person. People keep dying in the same way around this lady. It's pretty clear. Now, the defense said, come on. I mean, yeah, look at her. She's an old lady and stuff.

They said, nah. They said, they said, this is all circumstantial. There's Garvin Thomas. There could be another secret admirer out there. And, you know, she's a lovely 60-year-old church lady. And, you know, she provides for her kids and she brought kindness to the community. What are we talking about here? Maybe there's a rogue nurse in these hospitals.

You've heard of that a million times. It's been both the hospitals. So maybe it is. And then what about James Taylor and his mom, though, and her dad? That's the other problem. Rogue nurse. Rogue nurse came broke in the house on Thanksgiving. Boys in the Holy.

Her dad molested her too. That's what happened. Rogue nurse, man. Rogue nurse. Now the verdict comes in here. Now, the jury does not have the option of a lesser charge. It's only murder. First degree murder.

Because second degree murder, you can't accidentally administer arsenic for a year over to somebody. It's either premeditated and cold blooded or not at all. Oh, boy. So there's a lot. She has found guilty. of first-degree murder. Uh-huh. Okay.

Now, during sentencing, by the way, death penalty on the table. They're going to roast grandma. That's a tough one for a little old lady sitting there. And she's, that's a, you know, to point at her and go, we're going to kill fucking. Nice brooch, bitch. We're going to kill Aunt Grandma over here. I don't know which one she is. So the jury found two aggravating circumstances.

The murder was committed for monetary gain, the insurance, the estate, and basically, and she steered her husband, boyfriend into signing a will with a nod. And two, the murders were especially a heinous, atrocious, or cruel, which I couldn't agree more. Those are brutal. It's so fucked up. Now, mitigating circumstances are that she provided well for her children growing up, that when she learned of the arrest warrant, she surrendered peacefully. She didn't go down in a firefight. Hold on.

Let me get these big church glasses off. I'm going to start bucking shots at the cops. And that she'd shown concern and kindness for others in her community. Okay. So the mitigating is, look, I thought I could get away with it. That's what they just said. That's it. That's it.

That's it's it. Not me. They're not going to believe it. Come on. Look at it. Wow. Yep. ultimate penalty.

This is a 10 months of torture. This is, find me another murder case where someone torture someone for 10 months. Right. Good luck. It's hard. Keeping them on the edge of death and back and forth. This is fucking crazy. This is like a saw movie.

She thought she gave them enough and then they made it out and she thought she gave them enough. Every time, she didn't think that she was just slow. I think she thought she was giving them enough every time. I think she wanted it to mimic. Yeah. You know what I mean? 67 times the lethal dose, James. That's a lot.

She thought she gave them enough. But that's what built up, too. That builds up in there. So that's, I think. So that's a thing. But maybe that's what it is. Maybe she kept going, damn, I keep trying. You get it and you cycle it out of your body?

Because it's a naturally occurring thing, it's got to be able to be processed. And then if you beat it, you got to be dosed again. I only say I think she knew what she was doing this way because she did it twice this way. Yeah, yeah. You know what I mean? I think she was still. I think she thought the first one to kill him.

She was still doing it the same way to the more guy while he was in the hospital. She likes to drag it on over months because it worked the first time. But I don't know. You could be right. I'm not sure. Either way, you ma'am. Yes. You ma'am may fuck off death by lethal injection.

Come on, everybody. Let's kill grandma. Can't they just... I'm surprised they didn't death by any ant. Death by running over by a reindeer? What are we talking about? This is wild. So the state drops the remaining charges.

James Taylor's murder, Dwight Moore's assault, because let's face it. She's going to die. She's fucked. So what happens now? Movie time. They're making a movie right away about this. Oh yeah. An assistant producer, Daniel Ensign, saw a short wire story in the Los Angeles Times and said, fuck yes.

Fucking yeah. He said bodies loaded with arsenic. were being exhumed in a small southern town. The suspect's a former head checker at a supermarket, pillar of the church and a doding grandmother. I smell an Oscar. And the suspect who survived is an ordained minister? This is fucking, this is some TV shit right here.

Yeah. Yeah, so he said, then we called for the stories the North Carolina newspapers had written about the case, and that's when we realized there was something very interesting and complex going on. This was the last person in the world you'd expect to be accused of being a murder, I would say. 193, the journalist Jim Shutz published a book on the case called Preacher's Girl.

And before the trial is even over, they buy the film rights from this guy. Holy shit. So January 1993, the book goes on sale. Right away they get the film rights. Yeah. So the book here, they call it a fascinating, it's a fascinating book, nonetheless, for those of us intrigued by what makes murderers tick, especially grandmotherly born-again Christian murderers. Shock. I don't know if she's born again.

She's always a Christian. But I mean, I mean, she's in the evangelical thing. I don't think she's ever been a Christian. That's what I mean. She's been pretending to be a Christian for a long time now. February 16, 1993, the New, North Carolina, I almost called it New Carolina. The North Carolina Supreme Court hears the appeal for her murder conviction. And then they're going to have a decision for that in early 94.

TV movie comes out. Black Widow murders the Blanche Taylor story. Remember when the TV movies all had a colon and then like the so-and-so story? Blanche was played by, who do you think is going to play Blanche? The lady from murder she wrote. No, no. Angela Lansberry. Elizabeth Montgomery.

Who the fuck is that? Samantha from Bewitched. Are you kidding me? You swear to God. Samantha with her wiggly nose. She's going to fucking do it. Wiggle nose is a murderous. She's a murderous.

By the way, the production used Wake Forest University as a backdrop, but the only condition was that on Blanche's costume, there's no Wake Forest logos. Don't you dare. We do not want to be involved in this. So the script is written and called a piece of fiction loosely based on actual events, which is what these TV movies all are. They're all that.

So Elizabeth Montgomery, though, she's cast, and also David Clennon, who was on 30-something. Remember that's a boring-ass show, 30-something in the 80s? They get cast as Dwight and Blanche. Montgomery says, quote, Blanche has this vulnerability that made people forget. which she has done. Okay. Also, her sense of herself helped me a lot.

She was this nurturing, caring, clever, amusing, sexy person. All of that was true, except again, it was all just the flip side of wonderful. Then she said, she's an incredible woman. What drives me nuts about things like this, though, as if all that energy and cleverness and wit and manipulative ability had been turned around, the woman could have been anything she wanted to be. Yeah. Samantha said that.

Samantha said that. And she said all this stuff could have been in the plus column instead of the blackest column there is. And Reverend Moore must have had the constitution of an ox to survive as he did. Yeah. No shit. The other actor, the guy who plays Dwight said, yeah, I think the fictional Dwight appeared to me to be a man of goodwill and intelligence and good intentions who was led around by his libido. Run around by his dick. Yeah.

Every guy has one. That's what we're doing. he said that's what nearly killed him. He was blinded by lust and a kind of romantic haze. To some extent, I admire his loyalty to Blanche in the face of so much evidence that she was trying to kill him. You can call it one thing or you can call it another. I guess he was sort of a likable sap. Jesus.

Wow. They said although the movie deals with serious themes such as a child abuse and murder, Montgomery and Clinton also believe it has a sense of humor. So funny. Glennon's hilarious. Glennon says if this movie has any merit beyond the run of the mill, fact-based murder stories, it's that it presents the story in kind of a tragic comedy. I don't know if the comedy part is going to work, but there's potential for a great deal of laughter at the absurdity of the behavior of Blanche Moore. Yeah, we know.

We just did it. It works. It works. It's great. Three hours worth. Seven episodes. It's perfect. It's perfect.

behavior of the Blanchemore character and the responses of people around her. How did she get away with this for so long? And then he said, I think another thing that I hope people will find them using is the mixture of religious piety and rascality in most of these characters. The hypocrisy.

Yeah, they're talking about Jesus and the interpretations of the Bible. Meanwhile, their heads are filled with lustful notions. Yeah, that's out works. Stirring up drinks and blowing everybody. Blowing everybody. Elizabeth Montgomery said, think there should be a life sentence without parole. I think life sentence, a life in prison is far

worse than the death penalty. Both actors say they're opposed to the death penalty. Clemens says, I feel deeply the death penalty is wrong and that it degrades society to the level of the murderer. It troubles me to think that this entertainment could tip the scales one way or another in terms of public opinion against Blanche Moore. This is coming out while it's still going on. He then says, What worries me is that people might see the show and state that go ahead and kill her. As guilty as she may be, I don't think it solves anything by doing to her what she's done to others. So May 3rd, 1993, NBC airs, Black Widow murders, the Blanche Taylor story during Sweeps Month. Dang, they're trying to get the most attention.

This is for rating. Yeah. And in one of the reviews for it at the time, someone says in the paper, in ground for TV form, the meaty NC arsenic tale is one more sweeps weak turkey. In other words, they just slapped together a pile of shit and put it out. So, they're trying to get a daytime Emmy. Trying to get something, trying to get back in anyone acting career. By the way, she died only a couple years later, Elizabeth Montgomery.

I'm surprised so much. Yeah. 95. So basically, by the appeals, they're not even trying to say she's innocent. They're just going for procedural errors, including the 404B ruling. that they let in the other shit. The defense argued that the state never directly linked Blanche to the other crimes, so why should a jury trying her for Reid hear about them?

And the Supreme Court of the state said that it's a rule of inclusion. Other crimes come in unless their only value is to paint the defendant as a bad person. Here, the other poisonings prove plan mode of opportunity and identity. So keep on keeping on, Grandma. Boy. Now, years later, the Reverend Dwight Moore told a TV station he had no objection to her, if she got her death sentence overturned. He's fine with that. Okay.

He said, make of it what you will, basically, you know, that's what it is. He said that Blanche. It's hard to rotissory grandma. That's what I'm saying. He said Blanche's daughter, Cindy, had spoken publicly over the years about this, you know, thing. And he, you know, he felt bad about it. So in prison, Blanche has. written poetry and music.

She survived cancer. They think, by the way, her cancer and her other shit was fake back in the day. Yeah. But this is real. Because now she's in her 70s, too. So she survived chemotherapy and radiation. In prison. In prisons.

That's not even good care. In 2009, North Carolina passed the Racial Justice Act, which let death row inmates challenge their sentences using statistical evidence of racial bias and jury selection because they found out that's a huge deal if you look into it. Just not politically in terms of math. It's just a big deal. In 2010, Blanche, along with 11 other death row inmates, filed to convert their sentence to life under that law, arguing the racial composition of the juries were tainted. Okay.

Okay. You are the least tainted person who's ever existed on death row. It's not because you're white. And it's not because you're a grandma or anything there. Of course, the governor in 2013 repealed the Racial Justice Act because, you know. Really? Yeah. Yeah.

That was, I don't know, I'm not going to get into it. Yeah. Think about that time period and what came from it. Think about what came from that time. 2013? To 2000. Yeah. You know what I'm saying?

So there was stuff going on there. Lawyer here, one of Blanche's own attorneys who argued her appeal, was later convicted of embezzlement for misappropriation. for misappropriating client funds, including hers. The lady that was crying? No, no, no, no. Her attorney, the prosecutor was the lady who was crying. Oh, okay. Her attorney.

He reportedly also had a history of psychological problems, allegedly. Stole her money. Then, member Janet Branch Downing, the crying prosecutor? Whoa. Okay. She remarried, and that's why she's Janet Downing, left the DA's office in 91. Her only child, a daughter, was born with R-E-T-T, which is a horrible neurological disorder that wreaks havoc.

Over the following years, people said she became a troubled soul. She had a breakdown mentally and emotionally and just lost it, basically. She lost guardianship of her daughter after an emotional breakdown. Oh, no. On the morning of October 10, 2015, on Interstate 485 in Charlotte, she parked her car on the median and just walked into the fucking road and got hit by a fucking car and killed. Holy! She got out and just wandered into the center lane of the interstate and stood there and got

hit by a car. In hindsight, I feel like there was a big red flag being waved. You want to talk about a big red flag the night before, a neighbor said she came to his door asking for, quote, a gun or razor blades, one or the other. Do you happen to have suicide tools? Anything made of metal I could kill myself with, please. My God. She told him she'd hit rock bottom and she was done.

Do you have a gun or some blades I could use? And he was like, no. I don't have those either. Well, then I-75s that way. That's it. So the medical examiner ruled it a suicide. She's 62 years old. It's fucking horrible.

How old? She was 62 when that happened. Jesus. So North Carolina hasn't executed anybody since 2006. There's lethal injection protocols. They're fighting over the Racial Justice Act, the role of physicians who say that they, you know, we shouldn't be doing this. You know, do no harm. I'm killing a guy.

Can't do that. So North Carolina in 2025, though, passed Irina's Law, I-R-Y-N-A-A-A-R-Y-N-A-A-R-N-A, named after a young. woman murdered in another high profile case and signed it into effect. The law authorizes alternative execution methods, including firing squad and the electric chair most relevant. So we're just going backwards in time. We said, that's barbaric. Why don't we inject them?

It's a lot more. And then we go, we can't get the drugs. Well, fuck it. Run them over with a truck then. It's like, what are we doing? Stream across the median of the freeway. Fuck, man. So it pushes them to compress capital appeals into a roughly two-year window to clear

the path to get to execute everyone on death row. It's political shit trying to say, I'm the toughest. No, I'm the toughest. That's all this. So Blanche right now is 93 years old and on fucking death row. And if it's up to them, they want to get all this through so they can execute her when she's like 96. Can you, this is a little shaky woman that, come on, grandma, let's get up here.

They're going to have to help her into the fucking chair. We're in Velcro shoes and shit. Are you kidding me? Yeah. A walker with tennis balls on it coming up to the fucking death row. I don't know if her heart could stand being tied down to a country. What the fuck are we doing? What are we doing? She's already. Never mind. She's gone.

Let's just make a rule. If you hit 90, we take you off death row. We're not going to murder a 93-year-old person. That's insane. I don't care what they did. She's been for 20, 30 years? Yeah. If Ted Bundy was 93, we wouldn't take his rickety-e-e-a-old. ass and sit him in a chair. I just hang out, Ted. I think the raping days are done. I think every college girl in the country

could take him now. That's what I mean. I think we're all safe. He might have a coronary just seeing a pair of tits at that point. Yeah, you could kill him with that. Just put him in the chair and then on the viewing window

just have a chick flash and brah. Have the tripies, pull them all out. That's it. Explode his fucking art. He comes in his pants and dies right then. We're going to kill grandma, everybody. Come on. That's crazy. Wow. So in the media here in 1993, that author wrote a book.

The author found evidence that seemed to indicate that Moore set up Hutton in the sexual harassment suit and may have intentionally set the two fires. That's the other thing, too. They think she set the two fires, lied about the sexual harassment suit, lied about having cancer, lied about having surgeries. Bad. Okay. 1999, the Discovery Channel's the new detective, season four, episode six, Women Who Kill. Oh, yeah. Featured her and her crimes.

They were also portrayed on evil lives here and snapped, of course, because a woman killed somebody. So it's got to be unscathed. Also, deadly women as well. So there you go. Current Blanche, she is incarcerated North Carolina Correctional Institution for women in Raleigh, and she is registered prisoner number 0288-088. They are sharpening all kinds of shit to stab her with. I will tell you what.

So there you go, everybody. That is Burlington, North Carolina. And quite a fuck. I know we had a poisoning like a month and a half ago, two months ago. But that was a totally different thing. Like this is a, this is a serial killer. She got next to nothing in benefit of this. Oh, yeah.

Really not a lot. Jesus. Not too much. It's crazy. So if you enjoyed the story or just like the way we do our thing here, please get on whatever app you're on. Give us five stars. Netflix, give a thumbs up.

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Also, thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. You're amazing. You're the best. Thank you. Other producers this week, Winnie Gruncy Fartsey. I don't know what that means, but happy birthday, Winnie. She farts when she grunts.

She pushes hard. Heidi Griffin, Liz Vasquez, Peyton Meadows, Janice Hill, Melissa Magget, Jonathan Phipps, and Bill McClellan in Scotland. It's been a minute since we heard from them. He had a kid like 35 years ago when we first started this. Yeah, really? The kid just graduated law school. Stacey Winder, Ashley Closs and Percival would no last name.

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Steph. Like the camp. Yeah, like the camp with the cancer water. That's not good. Steph Martin, Caitlin Simpson, Carrie Tangi, Tangi, Spenseney. Spence, what is that? Spensane? Mike Coyt, like us.

Our prices are Spencein, everybody. Joe would know the last name. Sally Bottle, Bodle, Don Honobach. Erica would know the last name. Don Sidroni. Cedrone, Cedrone, Larry Hurd, that's so easy. Stephen Kramer, that's gross. Kathy Klein, Lindsay Batman.

I think it is Batman, not Bateman. Page Christian, like Bale, who also played Batman. Cassidy Smith, Tea Potty, BB340, Caleb Daniels. Nope, that's Daniels. Alexa Davis, Chrissy would know last name, Kayla would no last name. Dave Broughton, because it has been. Broughton. Derek Lee, Jonathan Dumber? Really?

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